Pressing rewind

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This article was published 28/01/2025 (620 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Nov. 11, 2010, Cory Wojcik went to the hospital twice.

His attention was split between two rooms in two wards on opposite poles of mortality, one eye ecstatically trained on a beginning and the other mistily peering toward an end.

His wife was about to give birth, his mother was about to die and Wojcik took on the role of stoic, inscrutable father and son. As far as he could tell, he was doing a good job hiding his inner turmoil.

“In my mind, I was the best actor you’ve ever seen in your life,” says Wojcik with a laugh. “That’s how I dealt with that day. I thought I could hide it from my wife, but she said, ‘No, no, no. You didn’t fool me. You’re not that good of an actor.’”

Perhaps not on that day, but since making the transition from a career as a substitute teacher to one as a performer, Wojcik has become a reliably charismatic and warm presence on Winnipeg stages, specializing in roles that situate him in the weeds of fatherly territory.

In last year’s Beautiful at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Wojcik played recording impresario Donny Kirshner, a prickly surrogate uncle to Tess Benger’s Carole King.

In Trish Cooper and Sam Vint’s The Comeback, also produced by RMTC last year, Wojcik played a man forced to grow up and reconnect with his family’s roots before his own nuclear unit could flourish.

As Billy Elliot’s father in a 2016 MTC production of the working-class ballet hit, Wojcik was called “marshmallow-centred, sensitive and honest” by former CBC reviewer Joff Schmidt.

But before he found his footing as an actor, Wojcik was caught in the middle of a joyful opening scene and a final cosmic bow at a Winnipeg hospital. It’s a fateful day the actor-writer-director has relived thousands of times in private and hundreds of times in public as the basis of Mix Tapes From My Mom, an autobiographical boombox musical that opens Thursday night at the Tom Hendry Warehouse.

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Before Wojcik’s mother Sherri died, she was an anti-algorithmic playlist machine, creating customized mixtapes for her loved ones as a pastime. “Twist and Shout by the Beatles was the very first song off the very first mixtape my mom made me,” Wojcik remembers.

For years, those cassettes were happy memories, but when Wojcik and his family cleared out their St. James home several years after their matriarch’s death, they resurfaced as rewindable reminders of a giving spirit gone quiet.

“They were in a big plastic tub behind the washing machines,” recalls Wojcik, who didn’t consider himself a particularly nostalgic person until he reached his 40s. There was so much to sort through that Wojcik felt overwhelmed.

“I was thinking, let’s get this place cleared out so we can get on with our day,” says Wojcik. “But my sister, she was the one who was making sure we were cautious and really thinking through what we’re doing. She’s the one who said, ‘Don’t throw out those mixtapes.’”

Wojcik listened, and the cassettes’ content became the lyrical basis for Wojcik’s most enduring work as a writer and performer. The musical, featuring Wojcik and a live band, premièred at the 2019 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival in a fitting location: X-Cues, a Sargent Avenue institution that resembled the types of venues Wojcik’s uncle’s band played and where his mother listened, always a No. 1 fan.

“Sharing a story this deeply personal on a public stage can be a challenge for any actor, but Wojcik is the type of performer whose charisma draws in the audience to create an immediate emotional connection,” Matt Schauebroeck wrote in his five-star Free Press review. Since then, the show’s lived on, visiting several Manitoba small towns — including Sherri Wojcik’s birthplace of Crystal City — as the RMTC’s touring production last year.

While the boombox style has become one of the show’s trademarks, Wojcik originally intended to develop a musical featuring only original songs. “But there are only so many sad songs you can write,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Nobody wants to see a guy get up on stage and bleed for an hour.’”

So Wojcik leaned on his fringe director, Mariam Bernstein, along with his friend and now-Warehouse director Trish Cooper for feedback, he says. They encouraged him to lean into the humour and joy of nostalgia, not only the pain.

During that fringe run, each performance required such emotional investment that Wojcik had difficulty waking up the morning after. But over time, Wojcik says he’s gotten a lot of strength from listening to audience members who’ve connected with the work and felt comfortable sharing their own stories of grief with him.

“Every time I do this show, I bring my mom with me,” says Wojcik, who won’t ever say never, but figures that this run of Mix Tapes will be the show’s last with him as a performer.

“Eventually, you’ve got to say goodbye,” he says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com