Back home and back with the Bard

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/02/2019 (2735 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rodrigo Beilfuss was an 18-year-old Brazilian exchange student when he first discovered Shakespeare in a high school English class at St. James Collegiate.

Now, at age 35, the actor-director will be the artistic director of Winnipeg’s Bard-centric company Shakespeare in the Ruins, effective March, it was announced Tuesday. He, along with his wife and three-year-old son, will move back to Winnipeg from Stratford, Ont., where Beilfuss has spent the past four years working at the Stratford Festival.

Beilfuss not only takes the helm of the company as it approaches its 26th year at Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park, but will also direct the season’s summer production — Hamlet — and says that job went to him before he was hired as artistic director.

“SIR sent out requests across the country for pitches for their production of Hamlet, which was chosen by (outgoing artistic director) Michelle Boulet,” Beilfuss says in a phone interview from Stratford. Beifuss’s pitch was a multi-ethnic production, similar to the multilingual Winnipeg production from 2015 — a co-production of Snakeskin Jacket and Beilfuss’s own Bravura Theatre companies — in which he played the Melancholy Dane. This time, the role of Hamlet will be played by actor Heather Russell.

The show runs May 30 through June 22.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing