Man of vision Winnipeg impresario never gave up on his dream, taking the story of the Winnipeg General Strike to stage and screen By: Alan Small Posted: 6:35 PM CDT Monday, Apr. 10, 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2023 (880 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Danny Schur, the composer and producer who brought the Winnipeg General Strike musical Strike! to the stage and its film adaptation, Stand!, to cinemas, died Monday of brain cancer. He was 56.

Rainbow Stage artistic director Carson Nattrass, who was part of the original cast of Strike! when it debuted on the Kildonan Park stage in 2005 and in revivals leading up to the 100th anniversary of the 1919 general strike, called his friend and colleague “formidable,” a man who refused to take no for answer, even when the city initially refused to allow Rainbow to host the musical.

“He moved mountains to make it happen,” Nattrass says of Strike!, which Schur wrote with fellow Winnipeg scribe Rick Chafe. “He rented Rainbow Stage himself… He nearly went bankrupt to make it possible.

“He means everything to me.”

Schur showed the same determination in bringing an adaptation of the musical to the silver screen. He was a tireless promoter, and when funding or grants dried up with one potential source, he took his sales pitch to others, finally getting the Canadian Labour Congress to fund a $1.25-million plan to take video copies of Stand! to schools.

Strike! became Stand! when director Robert Adetuyi came aboard the film project, shifting the focus to place greater emphasis on how the strike affected women, and Black and Indigenous Winnipeggers.

When new schedules ruled out key cast members, he found others, including Laura Wiggins, Marshall Williams and Gregg Henry, who would become the leads.

After years of stops and starts, Stand! premièred September 2019 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and received its Winnipeg debut that November when it was released across Canada, a few months past the strike’s centenary.

The 1919 strike and its effects on Winnipeg’s marginalized groups, especially the Ukrainian community of which Schur was a part, became his decades-long passion.

He studied reams of archival material and old newspapers for details about the violent clash, known as Bloody Saturday, which led to the death of Michael Sokolowski, who would become one of the main characters in Strike! and Stand!.

Schur would eventually help pay for a headstone for Sokolowski’s grave at Brookside Cemetery in 2003. He hosted walking and cycling tours of strike sites throughout the city, many of which would appear in Stand!

”What I find fascinating about the strike is that its history literally bleeds out of the buildings of our city,” Schur said in a Free Press story in 2003, when he workshopped Strike! at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, which hosted strike meetings in 1919.

“Although it’s almost 85 years later, not much has changed in the North End. The urban poverty and outright racism hasn’t changed, just the faces.”

While Schur would be best known for his strike-related productions, he produced his musical debut, The Bridge, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Ukrainian settlement in Canada, in 2000.

Hockey was another passion — Schur played goaltender on men’s teams throughout the city — and he followed it in his 2015 documentary, Made in Winnipeg: the Terry Sawchuk Origin Story, about the Hall of Fame goalie from Winnipeg’s Ukrainian Canadian community.

Schur suffered a heart attack in 2019 during one of those hockey games, despite being fit and trim from playing on an almost daily basis in the winter. After surgery and a short recovery, he posted videos on Facebook of himself stopping shots from players half his age at outdoor rinks.

Schur grew up in Ethelbert, a town 370 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, and learned the piano and sang in a Ukrainian church choir before moving to Winnipeg to attend the University of Manitoba’s School of Music.

Prior to turning to musical theatre in 2000, Schur worked with pop stars Chantal Kreviazuk and McMaster & James, as well as country group Doc Walker. He also co-wrote the 1999 Pan Am Games theme song with his wife, Juliane Schaible.

Schur returned to pop music in 2022, writing songs and producing videos with teenage singer Leah Janae, prior to learning of his cancer diagnosis late last year.

Nattrass, for whom Schur wrote O’Reilly’s Song in Strike!, hopes Winnipeg’s theatre community will follow up on Schur’s legacy of presenting theatre about the city and province and the people who live here.

“Rainbow Stage is inspired by him to put on similar shows (to Strike!),” Nattrass says. “We found out it was possible because he made it happen.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall

Alan Small
Reporter

Alan Small was a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the last being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.

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