Mythical musical resonates with portrayer of Percy

Earlier this year, when Manitoba Theatre for Young People cast Brady Barrientos for the lead role in the Percy Jackson musical The Lightning Thief, he slipped back into his old reading habits, re-introducing himself to the bestselling series by author Rick Riordan.

Thin Air director closes book on job

After 23 years at the helm of Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, director Charlene Diehl is stepping away to begin the next chapter in her life.

Diehl has been at the helm of what is now Plume Winnipeg, the organization that oversees Thin Air, since 2003, and will see out her role as director until the end of December.

“Honestly, there’s so much to juggle that I haven’t really had time to think about how I feel about any of it,” Diehl said by email. “I’m mostly ready to hand over the responsibility to someone fresh and to head into my next chapter.”

Diehl says she’s had the move in the works for a few months; for the 2025 festival she had scaled back her responsibilities, dividing them among newer staff members.

WECC needs $50K of help to stay open

Non-profit venue is appealing to the general public for donations through a fundraising campaign.

Rainbow Stage producing three shows next summer

To follow up the most financially successful season in its seven-decade history, next summer Rainbow Stage is headed to Jerusalem, Harvard and to a shtetl called Anatevka.

The company’s 72nd season will open in June with a run of Jesus Christ Superstar, the first time Andrew Lloyd Webber’s gospel rock opera has visited Kildonan Park.

Next, Elle Woods defies stereotypical expectations by nailing her LSATs to earn entry to a top Ivy League law school in Legally Blonde: The Musical, the smash adaptation of the 2001 comedy starring Reese Witherspoon. What, like it’s hard?

And in September, the country’s longest-running outdoor theatre company will join forces with Winnipeg Jewish Theatre to co-produce Fiddler on the Roof. That four-show run of Fiddler will mark the first time a Rainbow Stage show is produced under the dome in September, giving audiences a chance to see Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s classic musical run its course under a proper Prairie sunset.

Theatre review: Adaptation of beloved holiday film a sweet treat

Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre presented a capacity crowd with a big, beautiful early Christmas gift wrapped in a splashy showbiz bow as it launched its holiday production, Elf: The Musical, on Thursday.

Based on the 2003 film Elf, the stage adaptation, which premièred on Broadway in 2010, features a book by Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin. An entire Santa sack full of electrifying musical numbers added by composer Matthew Sklar are interwoven throughout the narrative, featuring razor-sharp, often astute lyrics by Chad Beguelin.

Elf: The Musical adds its own twists to the original screenplay, with its story-within-a-story now told from the perspective of a crotchety, TV channel-surfing Santa Claus (Daniel Bogart in his RMTC debut; also playing Grinchy publisher Mr. Greenway as an intriguing flipside) in lieu of the film’s original Papa Elf.

Santa gets the ball rolling as he reads a pop-up storybook about Buddy the elf that serves as a handy plot-framing device.

Student production grapples with fascism

With fresh waves of authoritarianism threatening modern-day democracy, acting students at the University of Winnipeg are travelling back to the latter days of Weimar Germany for a production they call “aggressively timely.”

A Bright Room Called Day, in its original format, was written by Tony Kushner — the playwright of Angels in America and screenwriter of director Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Lincoln and others — during the Reagan era as an allegorical warning about creeping fascism.

Inspired and exasperated by the election of Donald Trump to the office of American president, in 2019 Kushner retooled his decades-old work to address encroaching authoritarian nightmares.

Next week’s performance at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film will be the Canadian première of the modernized script, entitled A Bright Room Called Day Revisited.

Feds give MTYP $250,000 for upgrades

The federal government has allocated an additional $250,000 to the Manitoba Theatre for Young People to support the organization’s ongoing renovation and modernization projects.

Over the past two years, the Winnipeg company has undergone the most significant series of upgrades to its Forks Road site since moving there in 1999, with nearly $9 million funnelled toward expanded accessibility measures, green technologies and the opening of the Richardson Studio Theatre, a secondary professional-grade performance venue.

In that venue on Friday, Winnipeg South Centre MP Ben Carr announced the additional tranche of funding, drawn from the federal government’s Canada Cultural Spaces Fund. Combined with previously announced funding from the cultural spaces fund and the green and inclusive buildings program, Carr said the federal government’s financial backing of MTYP’s most recent capital campaign totals about $2 million.

“I had a chat yesterday with some folks from Meta — those are the people that run Instagram and Facebook — talking about young people and how to protect young people, and the discussion led us a little bit to how we’re really losing in our society, in part by virtue of social media, in part by other things, connectedness, and the way that telling stories and honouring the history and culture and identity through those stories plays a significant role in the health and well-being of our society and, I would argue, our democracy,” Carr said.

Beadwork artist Vi Houssin captures feeling evoked by increasingly imbalanced world

For Métis beadwork artist Vi Houssin, the title came first.Landfear is the evocative name of her first solo exhibition — on view until Dec. 19 at Aceartinc. — which wrestles with the relationship between humans and the Earth.

What’s up: Christmas market, Kanata Classics, Forbidden Colours, Portage and Main, PUP

If you’re feeling seasonally panicked, the second-ever Winnipeg Christmas Market is here to assist. The four-day event is a craft market and winter wonderland experience rolled into one sprawling, sparkly package.

World’s fastest pianist keyed up for homecoming

Arguably the world’s fastest pianist is from Winnipeg. “I played a lot of football when I was in (St Paul’s) high school. Kelvin was always beating us,” says Lubomyr Melnyk, referring to the alma matter of Neil Young, who, at 80, is four years older than Melnyk.

Santa’s tallest helper moves from big-screen to stage in RMTC's Elf the Musical

On a citywide publicity tour this summer to promote Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s tentpole Christmas production, Buddy the Elf had a private audience at city hall

Process of facing fears through tactile works helps artist and others cope with loss

Jess Young’s forest was seeded in a time of profound sorrow.

In the summer of 2020, on the way back from a camping trip at Turtle Mountain Provincial Park, the artist learned her biological father Robert Forrest had died.

There was more loss in store as Young’s step-grandfather, her two close friends and her dog also died that same year.

“There was a lot of death, it felt completely unbearable and it broke me in ways I didn’t know I was capable of,” Young says.

Channeling vacation and domestic vengeance

With winter around the corner, Winnipeg Jewish Theatre is revisiting a sprawling summer resort town this weekend with three staged readings of The Right Road to Pontypool.

In Croquis, sculptural paper costumes are handmade works of legacy and identity

Before every performance of Croquis, Vancouver choreographer Ralph Escamillan spends hours making sculptural works of art out of plain packing paper.

They could easily be displayed in a gallery, but these intricate creations aren’t static set pieces, they’re actual costumes, meant to be moved in. They get ripped, torn, trashed, destroyed and remade for every show — a rumination on the impermanence of live performance in which even the costumes are for one night only.

Their construction involves no gluing, taping or stapling — just hours of meticulous folding. Take the costume for a recent performance in Revelstoke, B.C.: a three-metre-tall paper dress that required him to be up on a ladder. That garment alone took eight hours of work.

Croquis, which will be performed in Winnipeg this weekend as an expanded quartet developed in collaboration with Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, was originally conceived as a solo performance.

Manitoba Opera mounts Puccini’s Tosca for the first time since 2010

Tosca returns to the Centennial Concert Hall this weekend for the first time in more than a decade.