The monster lives

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This article was published 16/07/2025 (410 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Four theatre grads from Calgary in an ogre-green Volkswagen Bus oozed into Winnipeg, intending to improvise a fairy tale in Old Market Square.

It was 12 years BC — Before Cube.

“There was no Cube. It was a circle stage in the middle of a field there,” recalls Ryan Gladstone, who first visited the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival with Monster Theatre in July 2000.

Monster didn’t know what would come of Fairy Tale: A Choose Your Own Adventure Play. Dressed as goblins, sea creatures and big, bad wolves, journeying through mystical forests and vast deserts, Gladstone, Katherine Sanders, Jen Kelly and Charlotte Mitchell performed daily to sparse but enthusiastic crowds, earning so little from the “pass the hat” system that they sustained themselves on chickpea curry from street vendors and two-dollar highballs from the King’s Head Pub.

The company left town satisfied, but disappointed to not score a review in the newspaper. But the day after the festival ended, as they gassed up the VW, they noticed a photo of Mitchell hamming it up on the front page of the Free Press, leaving “children in stitches.”

With that bit of validation, the bus headed west, but along the way, a rope came loose, sending their props flying: somewhere between Winnipeg and Saskatoon, a blue foam head the size of a refrigerator must have given a farmer quite the fright.

“We like to imagine that someone found it,” Gladstone says.

Twenty-five years after its first breaths, Monster is still alive and well, with Gladstone and company bringing four productions to this year’s fringe: the bar-down comedy Hockey Night at the Puck and Pickle; the drunken insurance-investigator tale of No Tweed Too Tight; Til Death: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, starring Tara Travis; and Riot, which features Gladstone and his brother Jeff as thespian nemeses in the story of two duelling productions of Macbeth taking place across the street from one another.

Some of the company’s other previous shows in Winnipeg included last year’s Erika the Red; Jesus Christ: The Lost Years (2006, 2018); The Canada Show (2001, 2006, 2017); and Juliet: A Revenge Comedy (2019, 2022), which earlier this year enjoyed an off-Broadway run at the Soho Playhouse.

Formed after its founders graduated from the University of Calgary’s BFA acting program, Monster’s name was inspired by their teacher, Keith Johnstone, who explained the difference between monsters and demons while discussing Shakespeare’s Iago.

“Demons are smooth and attractive on the outside, but have a cruel and twisted heart. But monsters are the opposite: strange and bizarre on the outside, but they always have a good heart,” Johnstone said.

That became a guiding principle for the company, which found its niche in alternate mythologies and revisionist musicals about historical, literary and nationalistic symbols after a brief foray into the tamer world of kids fringe in the early 2000s.

“We sang a song called The Maginot Line, about the Nazis moving into France and stuff. No swears or anything,” Gladstone told the Free Press in 2009. “Then we sang a version of It’s a Small World in a minor key, like a creepy thing. We started going on about how the Disney Corporation has lawyers everywhere and they’re watching your kids.”

Monster was more at home in the pub, as evidenced by the lasting appeal of Puck and Pickle. Every four years, the company rewrites the topical material to keep the show’s 230 short scenes — all taking place during a televised hockey game — fresh.

In 2013, ahead of the Sochi Olympics, Monster did Canada v. Russia; in 2017, the home team took on the U.S.

“We were going to do Sweden this year, but we decided, ‘No, it’s still America,’” says Gladstone, who stars alongside Jon Patterson. (Look out for references to Sam Bennett’s rough-housing, an orange-haired president and Connor McDavid’s buzzer-beating Four Nations Cup clincher).

Gladstone, 48, who also teaches at Vancouver Film School, credits the Winnipeg fringe as a launching pad and testing ground for brand new and more experienced companies, with audiences who push creators to repeatedly up their game when they make a return visit.

“When you talk about living the dream, I think it’s the ability to think of an idea for a show, to make it a reality and to bring it to audiences,” he says. “I found an old journal from 2001 with a list of shows I’d love to do some day.”

There are still some ideas without a checkmark beside them — monsters yet to be unleashed.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca

Under investigation

A theatre troupe whose members came up together through the Manitoba Theatre for Young People is running it back where it all started for this year’s fringe.

After last year’s cloning comedy House of Gold earned a spot on the short list for the Harry S. Rintoul Award for best new Manitoba play, Brighter Dark Theatre will stage its latest twisty offering at MTYP’s mainstage (Venue 21), where just over a decade ago they bonded during young-company productions of Legally Blonde and The Pirates of Penzance.

Starring Thomas McLeod, Dane Bjornson and Alanna MacPherson, with their former teacher Teresa Thomson directing, Third Party is “MTYP all the way down,” says McLeod, who wrote the script.

But the story isn’t exactly child’s play.

Inspired in part from a real-life vehicular collision experienced by the playwright, Third Party stars Bjornson as “a himbo, alpha-male finance guy” who crashes the car belonging to his wily girl-boss partner (MacPherson, MTYP’s Blue Beads and Blueberries), triggering a phone call with hard-boiled insurance adjuster Marty Fink (McLeod), who makes it his mission to poke holes in an already leaky relationship.

“He approaches his job like a Poirot, Columbo or Benoit Blanc,” says McLeod, who works by day as a legal writer and has a degree in English literature.

Third Party is “really influenced by Winnipeg’s reputation for being car-dependent,” McLeod says.

Brighter Dark’s isn’t the only production with a noirish hue: new local company Mad Tom Theatre’s The Show Must Go On (Venue 3) follows a high school theatre group whose production of Macbeth is bedevilled by an incompetent detective and a cunning saboteur.

From Australia, Racing Sloth Productions is stopping in with 2 Magic Rubies, 1 Private Eye: A Dirk Darrow Investigation, with magician Tim Motley (last year’s Barry Potter) bringing his psychic detective back to the fringe with a tale based on a story by Dashiell Hammett.

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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