Favourites and firsts New RMTC season balances beloved stories with contemporary premières By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:00 PM CST Friday, Jan. 31, 2025

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A Will Ferrell Christmas classic, a locomotive whodunit, a ruthless family-owned telecom saga and an adaptation of a shipwrecked standard of Canadian literature are among the productions set to be staged next season at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

Opening in October, the 2025-26 season is artistic director Kelly Thornton’s fifth at the helm, and she says the company’s strategy for programming its John Hirsch Mainstage is unchanged: providing a balanced menu of familiar fare with a strong built-in audience (Elf, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, the Canadian production première of Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi) and newer Canadian creations (the world première of Michael Healey’s Rogers v. Rogers, Kate Hennig’s comedy The Last Wife and Manitoba performer Andrea Menard’s Rubaboo: A Métis Cabaret).

“I always say it’s important to create a wide range of experiences,” says Thornton, who took on the RMTC creative mantle in 2019.

“If I was only doing Broadway musicals or stupid, funny comedies (like the Play That Goes Wrong) the whole time, I think it would get a little tiresome. So I think the diversity of theatrical experiences is super important to me.”

That’s reflected in the six-show mainstage season and the four-show slate at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, with both venues continuing with the same volume of productions as RMTC continues to climb out from its pandemic-inflicted hole.

“It’s full steam ahead, but we’re still in post-COVID recovery,” says Thornton, who adds that the company was determined to “grow its way out of the problem.”

“It’s certainly been a successful business practice since we started,” she says, noting that the company has put a significant dent in the 3,000-subscriber deficit caused by the pandemic while boosting single-ticket receipts.

“Give the people what they want. We are a giant theatre and a jewel of culture in Manitoba in terms of the theatre. We have the capability and the technical prowess to pull off these giant shows … We’re open, and we are going to go big and we will draw them back with magnetic productions.

“The pipeline towards a subscription is always the pipeline of singles, and our singles are blowing through the roof,” she says, noting that more than 10,000 standalone tickets to its current production of the musical Waitress were sold.

At the mainstage, the next season is front-loaded, starting with Pi (Oct. 16 to Nov. 8), the musical adaptation of Elf (Nov. 27 to Dec. 20) and Orient Express (directed by Thornton, from Jan. 15 to Feb. 7, 2026) before moving on to a co-production with Crow’s Theatre of Rogers v. Rogers (Feb. 19 to March 14), which is based on Globe and Mail business reporter Alexandra Posadzki’s book of the same name about the Rogers family’s bid to control the Canadian telecom industry.

Following that is Hennig’s The Last Wife (March 26 to April 18), about Henry VIII’s final spouse Katherine Parr, directed by Winnipeg’s Cherissa Richards; and Rubaboo (April 30 to May 23), a musical stew from Menard and co-creator Robert Walsh.

As the mainstage season begins with a giant, articulating puppet of a Bengal tiger, the Warehouse season kicks off with legendary puppeteer Ronnie Burkett’s first visit to RMTC in more than two decades. Wonderful Joe (Oct. 9-26) tells the story of a man and his dog as they explore a condo-fied world after receiving an eviction notice.

Then, master British playwright Caryl Churchill’s A Number comes to town (Nov. 13-29). A psychological thriller, set to be directed by Winnipeg’s Alex Poch-Goldin, the play explores technological creep and the ethics of cloning.

The Warehouse season closes with back-to-back world-premières scripted by Manitobans.

First from Trish Cooper (The Comeback, Social Studies) is Holland, a dramedy co-presented with Theatre Projects Manitoba that deals with disability, family responsibility and an antagonistic social worker (Feb. 5- 21, 2026, directed by TPM artistic director Suzie Martin).

Closing out the bill is In the Shadow Beyond the Pines, a haunting ghost story from Rhonda Apetagon, who developed the script during her stint in the RMTC’s Pimootayowin Creators Circle (March 12-28).

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com