Shining stage moments

It’s an old story at this point — Winnipeg’s stage community punches above its weight — and in 2025, Free Press theatre reviewers Holly Harris and Ben Waldman were happy to keep telling it.

From a field that included epic literary adaptations, inspired situational comedies, absurdist classics and original indie dramas, Harris and Waldman look back at the moments and performers whose excellence shone through.

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Holly Harris’s picks

Deeply moving doppelganger

There’s a moment when beloved Winnipeg actress Catherine Wreford first steps onstage as the late Princess Diana, during Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s mainstage production of Casey and Diana last March, in which all lines between past and present, fiction and reality blur.

It felt as if the “People’s Princess” had somehow returned from the great beyond to help bring to life the true story of her visit to Toronto’s AIDS/HIV hospice back in 1991.

It’s no small feat to play an iconic historical figure, but the willowy performer and former Broadway star — in her non-musical theatrical debut — infused her portrayal with a wellspring of compassion and humanity, particularly when comforting the dying Thomas (award-winning actor Gregory Prest), still deadpanning his way to the pearly gates.

Diana’s simple, eloquent silence spoke more than words could ever express, with Wreford’s deeply moving performance unlocking a floodgate of cheers — and tears.

Standout soprano

It may have taken 11 long years, but Manitoba Opera’s first staging of Puccini’s “verismo” opera La Bohème since 2014 proved well worth the wait.

Its ragtag tale of bohemians living in 1830s Paris has inspired tears since its 1896 Italian première; it’s undeniably one of the most beautifully tragic operas of all time.

The company’s latest production, stage directed by Anna Theodosakis, showcased the luminous artistry of Canadian-Cameroonian lyric soprano Suzanne Taffot in the principal role of tubercular seamstress Mimi.

The singer transformed before our eyes from shy neighbour in search of candlelight to a woman deeply in love with her dreamy-eyed poet Rodolfo (tenor Zachary Rioux) as her own life force flickers.

It’s a toss-up which of her arias moved the senses more: Act I’s Mi chiamano Mimì, which first displayed the singing-actress’s gorgeously expressive voice, or her later Act IV farewell duet with Rodolfo, Sono andati?, with the singer and her garret of artists well deserving their standing ovation for daring to live — and die — on their own passionate, unflinching terms.

Star-making speech

Despite raging wildfires, heat/humidity warnings and physical maladies striking its cast members seemingly on a daily basis, Shakespeare in the Ruins bravely soldiered on with its two summer productions.

One of those, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, managed to survive the vagaries of climate change, offering a rare opportunity to witness the 20th-century playwright’s absurdist masterpiece up close and personal, featuring al fresco direction by SiR artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss.

Winnipeg’s Arne MacPherson as Vladimir and Cory Wojcik as his long-suffering pal Estragon compelled throughout as they sparred and bickered, bared their souls and ultimately clung to each other, with their recurring line, “What do we do now?” becoming an existential mantra.

However, Liam Dutiaume — marking his brilliant professional debut as Pozzo’s white-wigged zombie Lucky — chilled to the bone.

The actor nailed his big speech, a staccato word salad of nonsensical imagery, pithy bon mots and guttural utterances; his truly harrowing performance was the stuff of nightmares and not soon forgotten.

Audience participation (the good kind)

Never shying away from pushing creative boundaries, Theatre Projects Manitoba (TPM) used its gripping season-opener, O.G.I. (The Only Good Indian), co-presented with Toronto’s Pandemic Theatre in April, to invite audience members into the headspace of a radicalized suicide bomber.

Five actors — the performance this writer attended featured the always wonderful Winnipeg actor/playwright/director Debbie Patterson — took turns throughout the run strapping on a suicide vest, before delivering self-penned, semi-autobiographical monologues about such topical issues as colonization and occupation (mostly) as settlers on Turtle Island.

However, what made this show particularly memorable was its eschewing a more typical after-show audience Q&A for a long-table discussion akin to a dinner party that served as Act II.

Audience members were invited onstage, joined by TPM artistic director Suzie Martin, to respond to a prompt by Pandemic Theatre founders Jivesh Parasram and Tom Arthur Davis.

This breaking of the fourth wall — and doing it with snacks — created theatre at its ultimate best with a full(er) engagement of hearts and minds, as we became subsumed into the fabric of the play in all its vulnerable, truth-telling glory.

Puppets that pulled our strings

Who can forget the astounding puppets of Life of Pi, and specifically “Richard Parker,” a Royal Bengal tiger that accompanies the 17-year-old Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel (Davinder Malhi) on his watery 227-day journey after surviving a shipwreck.

The co-production with Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre delivered one of the most visually breathtaking productions in recent memory, also riding the waves of a rock solid design team that made this play pop.

The fantastical cast of anthropomorphic puppets created by Calgary’s Puppet Stuff Canada (led by designers Brendon James Boys and Reese Scott), and including a zebra, orangutan, laughing hyena, flying fish and sea turtle magically took on lives of their own as they fleshed out Saskatoon-based writer Yann Martel’s award-winning tale.

However the Bengal was the true star, with puppeteers Troy Feldman and Braydon Dowler-Coltman ensuring every one of the big cat’s rocketing leaps, coiled pacing and paw licks, underpinned by bestial grunts and groans, resonated in believability that enthralled while threatening to capsize its own human counterparts.

Ben Waldman’s picks

The Fonda Award

As with Henry and Jane in On Golden Pond, there’s always a thrill in seeing parents and their children perform on stage or screen, whether the roles they’re playing reflect the familial dynamic or not.

At this past year’s Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival — which welcomed nearly 85,000 ticketed showgoers, the highest total since prior to the pandemic — 17-year-old playwright/actor Adia Branconnier and their father, Mike, played mirrored versions of themselves in I Hope You Know, a warm, often hilarious coming-of-age journey set on an intercity train.

A finalist for the Harry S. Rintoul Prize, the two-hander soared like a Canadian Lady Bird.

Wojcik’s Big Year

The surname Wojcik was all around in 2025. In January, Cory recounted the harrowing and hopeful story of the end of his mother’s life coinciding with his son’s birth in Mix Tapes from My Mom, a boombox musical at RMTC’s Tom Hendry Warehouse.

Fast-forward to June, when during a lag in rehearsals for Waiting for Godot, Wojcik, playing Estragon, was kicking around a hackysack with the young actor cast by Shakespeare in the Ruins to play The Boy: Wojcik’s son Mackenzie.

One collaboration wasn’t enough: the Wojciks also co-starred in Liars at a Funeral, a production that opened PTE’s season with riotous and borderline-raunchy family humour that felt right at home for the father-son team.

The Inflatable Bunny Award

We Quit Theatre’s dance docu-drama Glory! is so dense with commentary that it could form the basis for an upper-level university course, but it was also one of the most entertaining, unpredictable and wonderfully disruptive experiences I’ve had at the theatre.

Concocted by Gislina Patterson, Dasha Plett, Emma Beech, Dhanu Chinniah and Arne MacPherson, Glory! revisited and deconstructed a pair of alternate utopias preserved through the proliferation of physical media: Playboy Magazine and Free to Be You and Me.

A free-form exploration of identity, gender and contextualized nostalgia, Glory! was also wickedly funny and delightfully liberating. I agree with Daniel Thau-Eleff of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, who hopes for more theatre like this — uncategorizable, challenging and bold — in 2026 and beyond.

Powerhouse Award

In June, for the first time, I watched a professional production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, mounted by the ever-reliable indie company the 28th Minute.

The role of Blanche DuBois — that southern belle on leave in New Orleans — is considered one of the more challenging roles in the American theatre, and my goodness, did Heather Roberts ever rise to the occasion.

A longtime featured player for the 28th Minute, Roberts owned the stage, summoning such deep pain that my ovation was delayed by my need to remember how to stand. The entire cast was excellent, but Roberts was undeniable.

Same goes for Jessy Ardern, the creative force behind Prophecy, which stands as my favourite local production of 2025.

Produced by Theatre Projects Manitoba and directed by Suzie Martin, Prophecy placed writer-star Ardern in the midst of empiric collapse, injecting the mythological roles of Cassandra, Briseis, Hecuba and Andromache with a modern voice that felt both urgent and clear.

An award-winning playwright and performer, Ardern reunites with director Martin in February, making her Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre debut as Carrie — a harried mother navigating social systems — in playwright Trish Cooper’s Holland, a co-production with TPM.

Looking ahead, Ardern has written an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac for the 2026-2027 RMTC season.

winnipegfreepress.com/hollyharris

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman