Winnipeg brothers win second fringe award

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This article was published 31/07/2023 (1146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the second time in four years, Winnipeg theatre collective JHG Creative is the recipient of the Harry S. Rintoul Award, the prize given to the best new Manitoban play at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival.

This year’s winner, the musical comedy World’s Fair 1876: The Centennial Exposition, was chosen by the Manitoba Association of Playwrights (MAP) after a stand at the Gargoyle Theatre.

The award, named for the late Manitoba playwright and founding artistic director of Theatre Projects Manitoba, has been given out each year since Rintoul’s death in 2002 at the age of 45. It was presented, along with a $750 prize, on Sunday night by MAP.

Called “laugh-out-loud hilarious” in a five-star review by Free Press columnist Jen Zoratti, World’s Fair 1876 starred Monique Gauthier and the sibling duo of Connor and Cuinn Joseph; the brothers last won the Rintoul in 2019 for their espionage-tinged thriller, The Cause.

The new show’s development began in 2021, when during a Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre workshop the group was tasked with coming up with four pitches for future productions. They each felt like “fun, dumb ideas,” recalls Connor Joseph. His concept centred on the titular event, 100 years after American independence, where Alexander Graham Bell introduced the world to the telephone and another inventor named Ethelbert Watts introduced the portable bathtub.

A five-minute sketch became a full-fledged musical after the group had a fortuitous realization. “This wasn’t such a terrible idea at all,” Connor Joseph says with a laugh.

The Rintoul Award is the latest professional success for JHG Creative, which mounted the original pop-punk musical Breaking Up With Me at the Gargoyle this spring. Starring Ian Ingram as a wannabe musician dealing with anxiety, depression, and OCD, each depicted as a member of his character’s imaginary band, the production was a journey into the current mental health crisis.

The day that musical — featuring live accompaniment by composer Jacob Herd — ended, Gauthier and the Josephs started prepping World’s Fair 1876 at the same Ellice Avenue venue for the fringe. The brothers, who are both teachers, also starred in another fringe show, Lessons They Won’t Let Us Teach in School, while Gauthier and Cuinn Joseph were on stage for the improv troupe Club Soda’s fringe production.

For Gauthier, a full-time health-care worker, and Cuinn Joseph, the 2023 fringe festival included 31 performances over the course of 12 days.

With the win, Gauthier and the Josephs become the fourth repeat winners of the Rintoul Award, joining Joseph Aragon, Daniel Thau-Eleff, and the duo of Jessy Ardern and Ariel Levine.

World’s Fair 1876 was one of five fringe productions shortlisted for this year’s Rintoul, including Gilles Messier’s Countdown to Babylon, Hypothetical Projects’ How to Live Forever, One Trunk Theatre’s Saplings, and Ethan Stark’s A Work in Progress.

 

A good weekend for the runner-up

Stark received a $250 prize as the Rintoul Award’s honourable mention for A Work in Progress, produced by Crosswalk Productions.

The 22-year-old film and theatre graduate started writing A Work in Progress in local playwright and actor Debbie Patterson’s playwriting class at the University of Manitoba and later workshopped the story with the local company One Trunk Theatre.

In a 3.5-star review of the finished product, the Free Press’s Cierra Bettens called Stark’s playwriting debut a “tender queer drama” that balances “intense storylines with dry humour.”

For Stark, it was important to showcase what he calls “casual queer representation” in the show, which follows ex-lovers Emma and Mia as they revisit their individual and shared histories while sitting on a park bench and listening to the radio, which transports the pair back and forth across romantic timelines.

This past weekend, Stark darted between Winnipeg, where his fringe production was wrapping up, and Gimli, where he was a finalist in the Gimli International Film Festival’s RBC Pitch Competition.

With $10,000 on the line, aspiring filmmakers Stark, Sarah Luby, Catherine Dulude, Reed Makayev and Farrah Murdock pitched their film concepts to a panel of three judges: acclaimed director Guy Maddin; the producer, researcher and clearance specialist Elizabeth Klinck; and Sarah Simpson-Yellowquill, an Indigenous filmmaker and the National Screen Institute’s program manager.

Stark’s idea was for a film called Haircut, following a trans man struggling with agoraphobia and self-perception. For three minutes, he and the other finalists each pitched their concepts, followed by a three-minute question period from the judges. All along, an audience watches.

“My knees were shaking, but I don’t think anybody noticed,” says Stark, who is inspired by the actor-filmmaker Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women, Barbie).

Ultimately, the judges selected Farrah Murdock’s project Regalia as the winner. Murdock will receive $10,000 in production funds from RBC, $5,000 in equipment rental grants from William F. White International, a $1,000 equipment rental credit, plus a story-editing and directing mentorship from the National Screen Institute.

The biggest honour? Once it’s made, Regalia will have its premiere screening at next year’s festival.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com