Christmas flicks target of PTE holiday improv Outside Joke’s Holiday Musical Extravaganza

With construction ongoing at Portage Place, the Christmas season will look different in the downtown mall’s history: the food court is walled off, the clock tower’s gone, and earlier this week, the legendary fountains were removed.

But at Prairie Theatre Exchange, the theatre company housed on the mall’s top floor, annual holiday traditions are well underway.

In the rehearsal spaces, preparation has begun for Munsch Upon a Time, a five-story showcase of the iconic children’s author’s work. Written by Debbie Patterson, the upcoming run (Dec. 19-Jan. 3) marks the first time PTE has visited Munsch’s world onstage since before the pandemic, when a shift in programming put a halt to the decades-old custom.

During the annual Munsch show’s hiatus, PTE forged a new holiday tradition with the improv comedy group Outside Joke. Since Christmas 2022, Andrea del Campo, RobYn Slade, Toby Hughes, Jane Testar, Chadd Henderson and Paul De Gurse have been developing one-of-a-kind, one-night-only holiday fare for PTE.

At first, the group set its sights on Dickens, reinventing A Christmas Carol with zany flare. But after exhausting that concept beyond their own interest, the local comedic mainstays trained their focus on what’s become one of Winnipeg’s definitive cultural exports: the blandly predictable network holiday feature film.

Accompanied by pianist De Gurse, Outside Joke’s Holiday Musical Extravaganza (running to Dec. 21) will find the players improvising a new, full-length Hallmark-style movie musical every night.

As preparation, the troupe watched dozens of Hallmark features together, analyzing the notoriously soapy genre to an academic degree.

“You typically get one character from the big city who has to go to a small town for Christmas. For some reason, they don’t have time for Christmas — it’s not fully in their hearts,” says De Gurse, who pores over the group’s Hallmark movie spreadsheet.

“As opposed to the small town, where Christmas is the biggest deal of all, and maybe there’s this small-town person who’s the most perfect person. And wouldn’t it be great if these two got together.”

The group plays with the familiar tropes of these films — a holiday tradition that’s threatened, a relationship that finds itself on the rocks.

“Those are the themes that we keep, though we stay pretty variable so that we can move them around the story based on the audience’s reaction,” he says. “And of course, it always ends with a kiss.”

The group, which has been performing together for more than 20 years, is expecting several walk-on performers to join in on the fun, including local blogger Natalie Bell (PegCityLovely) and Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair, a former high school performing arts teacher. On Dec. 18, frequent Outside Joker Leif Ingebrigtsen will add percussion to De Gurse’s piano score.

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A thunderous response from audiences has led Manitoba Theatre for Young People to extend its run of The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical.

Originally scheduled to close Dec. 28, the production has added new performances on Dec. 29 (4 p.m.) and Dec. 30 (noon and 4 p.m.).

In her review, the Free Press’s Holly Harris praised the “heavenly” all-local cast of the musical, adapted from the bestselling fantasy-mythology novels by Rick Riordan.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman