Performing puppeteer returns Ronnie Burkett graces Winnipeg stage after 20 years with hot topic storytelling By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:14 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025 Last Modified: 7:59 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025 Updates

Ronnie Burkett takes the streetcar, but the displacement of his neighbourhood mechanic left the Toronto puppetmaster feeling as if a series regular had been written out of his life.

“The woman who owned it was the soul of the neighbourhood,” recalls the 68-year-old Burkett, who’s been touring original puppet shows since he was a teenager in Medicine Hat, Alta.

“She would have breast-cancer fundraisers, pet-adoption events and a wading-pool spa for the dogs in the summer. And she had this sign that they’d change the message every couple of weeks, always hopeful and positive.”

But the quotes — for repairs and for laughs — are gone: during the pandemic, a planned condominium development forced the owner to sell.

Burkett began to worry about the ways a new tower would change everything: could his neighbours afford their rent, would artists ever be able to live in the city again, was he silly to believe that his beloved Roncesvalles would be spared the indomitable creep of gentrification?

Those questions intrude on the puppet-scale neighbourhood in Wonderful Joe, a multi-character tale that opens the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s season Thursday at the Tom Hendry Warehouse.

Running to Oct. 26, the production marks Burkett’s (Tinka’s New Dress, Happy) return to Winnipeg stages after 20 years away in different cities facing much of the same pressure.

No matter where his career takes the constantly touring Burkett, he says he’s typically plopped into the centre of a city, where luxury towers rise in tandem with the cost of living, despite the concerns of the people living cheque to cheque.

From that struggle, Burkett carved the character of Joe, a quietly queer octogenarian who receives an eviction notice, eliciting a round-the-block journey with his dog Mister to visit other characters liable to disappear in the shadows of skyscrapers: an elderly crone, a trashcan performance group, an aging punk and a pair of sex workers.

“The great thing that puppetry allows me to do is not be locked into being me or being my age. By creating puppet characters, I get to play all these different inhabitants of my psyche and of my brain. They’re my mask, they’re my drag or they’re my avatar. Call them what you will,” Burkett says.

That provides the creative risk of playing across racialized and gendered lines, with Burkett’s cast of puppets including Indigenous, trans and South Asian characters. It’s a choice that Burkett says was essential to depicting the story of Wonderful Joe with a sense of true interconnectivity.

“When I realized I wanted to talk about people who lived on the lower margins of the economic scale in a city, I couldn’t just make a show about a bunch of white people. Technically, I’m an old white man now. It’s a risk to portray other skin tones, other cultures, but I thought I couldn’t represent the cities I know without doing that,” Burkett says.

The artist explains he wanted the character to “live in their own weight” without having to justify their living situation, their race or their immigration status.

“They just live in the city, so that was kind of the lens I wanted to look at the world through,” he says.

Burkett’s been using puppetry as a lens since discovering a marionette diagram in his parents’ World Book Encyclopedia in the mid-1960s.

In need of dowels, the seven-year-old grabbed the household broom.

“I went into the basement and took a saw and started cutting it up and tried to join it with screws that I found,” Burkett recalls.

That experiment resulted in a spanking, but for Christmas, Burkett received a lion hand puppet.

“He’s actually still here in my studio. I can see him. I took him to school and forced everybody to watch me do performances. So that was sort of the beginning of all that,” he says.

While Burkett’s ambition and skill blossomed under the tutelage of mentors such as Noreen Young (Under the Umbrella Tree) and Bill Baird (The Sound of Music’s Lonely Goatherd mastermind), the performer still maintains that an audience — whether in a classroom, on a sidewalk or in a theatre — is what makes his work possible.

“I’m never miked, so what I do is pretty primal. I’ve got these little jointed figures that are going to move around in the light, and I’m going to tell you a story every night in the dark without amplification, so let’s go,” he says.

“I’ll do my part and they show up and, you know, unbeknownst to them, those strangers have put on their shoes and coats and plopped their money down at the box office, but they come in as individuals, and more often than not, most of the time, turn into that thing called an audience. I will tell you, there is no drug on the planet that is more intoxicating to me than that.”

His approach to storytelling looks the same. As for that condominium development in Roncesvalles? The old garage is still standing.

“The market is tanking, and it doesn’t look like that condo will go up at all,” Burkett says. “It’s still a mechanic’s shop, but it’s not hers.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.com