Spoiled for choice

The Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival returns this week for its 38th year, and executive producer Chuck McEwen says audiences should take the fest’s 2025 theme to heart.

“Choose Your Own Adventure” means flipping through the fringe program to plot your own course, making picks from a field of 145 stage productions around the city until July 27.

“The fringe is basically the same every year. What’s always new are the artists,” says McEwen.

And their art: this year, a notable 92 of the productions in the fringe program are classified as new works, meaning that newbies and longtime fringers alike will have ample opportunity to encounter pieces of live theatre — from storytelling and improv to one-person dramas and full-cast musicals — nobody has experienced before, for better or for worse.

(Throughout the festival, the Free Press is your home for fringe coverage, with our team committed as always to reviewing every single production for your theatre-going pleasure at wfp.to/fringe.)

There’s not much at this point that could surprise McEwen, who’s been at the helm of the fringe frigate since 2008 and steered the citywide theatre festival through the pandemic era. But amid ongoing concerns with municipal air quality, and the political climate with neighbours to the south, the executive producer says the festival team had to anticipate challenges that were outside its control.

Though all of the festival’s ticketed productions take place indoors at venues across the city, the spirit of the fringe is largely associated with Old Market Square, which serves as a free hub for performers, street vendors and festival-goers, with live music and family entertainment running daily.

The smoke from northern wildfires is top of mind for McEwen, who says he was watching last weekend’s Winnipeg Folk Festival closely to see how organizers — who didn’t cancel any performances — handled air-quality concerns.

“We are going to notify the public when we have high-risk days as indicated by the air-quality health index online, and for that, we would recommend to the public to take precautions.”– Chuck McEwen

“We sort of based what we’re planning on doing on what folk fest did because we’re similar kinds of events. For us, we are going to notify the public when we have high-risk days as indicated by the air-quality health index online, and for that, we would recommend to the public to take precautions,” he says, adding that includes suggestions of masking, staying home and minimizing the amount of time spent outdoors.

While air quality might impact outdoor festivities, for the most part, the choppy trade situation and border concerns with the United States had a minimal impact on the geographical makeup of the festival’s slate of performers, McEwan says.

“Give or take, we have the same number of American and international performers we’ve had in the past. It’s basically 50 per cent local companies, 30 per cent the rest of Canada, and 20 per cent international, including the states,” he says.

That said, McEwen noticed that early in the application process, a few American artists decided against a visit to Winnipeg because they were concerned whether they’d be allowed to return to the U.S.

For those artists who do make the trek, the festival’s productions will be mounted at 25 venues across the city. If you’re flipping through your program and notice that there’s no Venue 7, it’s not a clerical error. Normally, the Dave Barber Cinematheque would occupy that slot, but McEwen says a scheduling change meant the productions originally slated for the downtown movie theatre have instead been shuffled to different locations.

No performances were cancelled.

While the extended Exchange District hosts half of the festival’s venues, including the Royal MTC’s John Hirsch Mainstage (Venue 1), RRC Polytech (Venue 11) and the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame (Venue 24), the festival has a few other performance hubs that spread audiences across the city.

In St. Boniface, Theâtre Cercle Molière and Centre culturel franco-manitobain play host, while in the West End-downtown nexus, the Gargoyle Theatre, the University of Winnipeg’s Asper Centre for Theatre and Film, Prairie Theatre Exchange and the West End Cultural Centre will look to draw crowds of their own. Among other non-Exchange venues is the Gas Station Arts Centre in Osborne Village.

“Having those little hubs is always great because hardcore fringers do like to maximize their time to see two or three shows in an evening if they can,” says McEwen.

“It helps people make an evening of it.”

Programs are available for $10 at select Manitoba Liquor Marts, the Royal MTC box office and McNally Robinson Booksellers.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.

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