Finding new beats for the Bard

When imagining the music of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, it is likely the gentle lilt of a lute that comes to mind: the world’s most famous playwright believed the instrument had the power to transport listeners into another world. That’s according to the Lute Society, an international organization that might be a little bit biased when it comes these matters.

Nothing against the lute, but director Christopher Brauer went in a different direction for the soundtrack of Shakespeare in the Ruins’ upcoming run of the Bard’s beloved farce, which begins with Duke Orsino declaring, “If music be the food of love, play on.”

“It was always clear in original Shakespearean productions that despite the historic nature of the story being told, it’s still happening here and now,” says Brauer, 55, the chair of the University of Winnipeg’s department of theatre and film.

Twelfth Night centres on twins Viola (Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu) and Sebastian (Elio Zarrillo). After being separated in a shipwreck, the siblings become embroiled in a love triangle that revolves around mistaken identities.

Playwright immerses herself in Gabrielle Roy’s world to muse on warmest season

Not satisfied with taking a walk in Gabrielle Roy’s shoes, Marie-Ève Fontaine decided to sleep in the famed author’s bed.

The St. Boniface theatre artist was searching for inspiration five years ago when she was commissioned by Théâtre Cercle Molière to adapt Cet été qui chantait, an epistolary collection of naturalistic memories written by Roy in the evening hours of her literary heyday.

Compiled in 1972, released in English as The Summer That Sang, Cet été was inspired by the writer’s summertime writing enclave, a cabin in the Quebec town of Petite-Rivière-Saint-François.

From that cabin, Roy observed simple natural phenomena, capturing the drama and comedy of living creatures through a lens of youthful innocence and wonder, an experience Fontaine recreates in her hour-long puppet play, recommended for Grade 3 and up.

New musical gives voice to solitary struggles

When we first meet Brennan, his mental illnesses enshroud him like a weighted blanket.

He wants to get moving, but he can hardly stand up. He wants to play an original song at an upcoming open mic, but he can barely bring himself to pick up his acoustic guitar — the thing he loves more than any other object in his possession.

Brennan is played by Ian Ingram in the sharp new musical Breaking Up With Me, written by Connor and Cuinn Joseph. It’s the second production to launch at the Gargoyle Theatre, which is dedicated to premiering new works by local playwrights.

Brennan is so convinced he will fail that he neglects to even consider the possibility he might succeed if only he were to try.

Family skewed

Inside every house, there is enough domestic drama to fill a three-act play. Most families keep their travails and traumas locked away, doing their best to silence their explosions, dab at the stains of turmoil, and pretend nothing happened in the first place.

Not the Kellers.

The central family of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons airs its dirtiest laundry in the backyard.

Set in the era immediately following the Second World War, All My Sons was for Miller a transformative exploration of a new brand of national post-traumatic denial. Upon its première in 1947, it marked the beginning of a confrontational era in American entertainment, defined by robust cynicism and simmering anger over what had been lost at home, even with the greatest battle supposedly won way over there.

What’s up: Pride Month, live music and food festival

CMHR sashays into Pride Month with a pair of drag eventsLady Muse and the Inspirations

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Friday, 7 p.m.

Admission free, registration required

SiR’s ‘Macbeth’ awarded best feature at Welsh film festival

The whisperings from abroad are far from foul: Shakespeare in the Ruins’ film adaptation of Macbeth was named the best feature at the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival in Wales.

Filmed in the fall of 2020, with contributions from more than 30 local stage actors, Macbeth was the first feature-length production in the local outdoor theatre company’s history. Co-directors Sarah Constible and Michelle Boulet, along with producer Lisa Nelson-Fries, accepted the honour at the annual festival in Llanelli, Wales, over the weekend.

Shot in black and white, the film stars Ray Strachan, Julie Lumsden, Cherissa Richards, Arne MacPherson, Debbie Patterson, Gabe Daniels, Tobias Hughes, Olaoluwa Fayokun, Andrea del Campo, Hera Nalam and Melissa Langdon.

The news of the victory comes with Shakespeare in the Ruins’ 2023 season less than two weeks away: on June 1, the company’s adaptation of the Bard’s Twelfth Night kicks off at the Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park.

Miller’s masterpiece at 28th Minute

Long before he became a professor, writer and director in Winnipeg, George Toles was a 16-year-old in Hamburg, N.Y., whose passion for the stage was ignited when he read a play that managed to devastate, excite and enrage him in equal measure: Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

It was a work upon which the playwright staked his entire career: after the flop of his first show, 1944’s The Man Who Had All the Luck, the shrewd Miller vowed that should his followup suffer a similar fate, he’d find himself a new career.

“What I did was decide that I would write a play which would satisfy me in every conceivable way,” he told an interviewer in 1995.

It certainly had that effect on Toles, who vowed to mount a production before all was said and done.

Theatre Projects Manitoba season includes first collaboration with RMTC

Teamwork was the word of the evening as Theatre Projects Manitoba unveiled plans for its 2023-2024 season to a giddy crowd at the Times Change(d) High & Lonesome Club Wednesday night.

In her first season in charge of programming, Theatre Projects Manitoba’s artistic director Suzie Martin has mustered up collaborations with one of the province’s oldest theatre companies as well as one of its newest.

“This season is all about relationships,” Martin said.

For the first time in the independent company’s 33 years, it is partnering with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre on a co-production, bringing Governor General’s Award-winning playwright David Yee’s Among Men to the Tom Hendry Warehouse stage. It’s a major collaboration, called “a perfect marriage” by RMTC artistic director Kelly Thornton.

What’s up: Kelly Bowen reads, Manito Ahbee celebrates, opera singers mansplain

Kelly Bowen launches new historical fictionMcNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park location

Wednesday, May 24, 7 p.m.

Free admission

Bestselling Winnipeg romance and historical-fiction novelist Kelly Bowen returns with a wartime novel based on the true story of a Resistance agent holed up in a crumbling castle, and her great-granddaughter, who uncovers her stunning story decades later.

From a pineapple under the sea… to Winnipeg

Who stars in a musical that soon you can see? SpongeBob SquarePants.

With Sandy and Plankton and a pack of sardines? SpongeBob SquarePants.

If nautical nonsense be something you wish, there’s no need to drop to the deck and flop like a fish: the Winnipeg Studio Theatre’s Studio Works Academy is putting on its own version of The SpongeBob Musical, a Broadway smash based on the beloved animated series created by Stephen Hillenburg.

Director Brenda Gorlick, the mother of two former SpongeBob addicts, was already well-versed in the world of Bikini Bottom, the sea-floor town where SpongeBob lives, breathes and giggles.

SiR’s pandemic-inspired feature film Macbeth nominated for prestigious Welsh award

When the pandemic took live theatre away, Shakespeare in the Ruins took the Bard to the movie theatre instead.

In the fall of 2020, the innovative outdoor theatre company, which performs annually at the Trappist Monastery Park, was looking for a way to stay busy while audiences stayed home.

“We were in limbo,” artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss recalls.

That’s when troupe members Sarah Constible and Michelle Boulet made a fateful pitch: to capture Macbeth as a feature film, shot in black and white. Constible and Boulet didn’t want to simply shoot a stage production; they wanted the company to use the film medium to its fullest capacity.

Cinematheque crowns King Hu as part of spotlight on Asian films

With the coronation of King Charles at the top of the news cycle, the Dave Barber Cinematheque will be celebrating a different royal figure this weekend as part of its Asian Heritage Month series: King Hu.

The film director is considered a master of the wuxia genre — a subgenre of Chinese cinema with a focus on balletic martial arts sequences — known for a series of epics released in the 1960s and 1970s, including 1967’s Dragon Inn. According to the movie’s Criterion Collection write-up, Dragon Inn was a blockbuster that “breathed new life into a classic formula and established Hu as one of Chinese cinema’s most audacious innovators.”

Five of Hu’s films, including a 4K restoration of Dragon Inn, are screening this month at the Cinematheque, says Winnipeg Film Group executive director Leslie Supnet, who sees Asian cinema as a vast universe that audiences should consider exploring for reasons both artistic and social.

“As a Filipino from the diaspora, Asian Heritage Month is an important time to recognize Asian contributions to culture and society as well as recognize the challenges we face such as the legacies of colonialism and racism,” says Supnet, writing by email from a film festival in Germany.

Fear, loathing and a scramble to regain safe ground

The campers are arriving in three hours and all is quiet at Camp Mazal: the calm before the swarm.

Phung finally makes it to Winnipeg to host comedy festival

Andrew Phung has something to admit ahead of his hosting gig this weekend at the Winnipeg Comedy Festival: he’s never been to Winnipeg, and he knows next to nothing about this city.

Amos the Kid’s long and winding road

Dressed from boot to cowboy hat in denim, on a sweaty stage in a sweaty tent packed with bopping beanies and stomping feet, Amos the Kid was midway through the biggest set of his life when he decided he was thirsty.

“God damn, I need water,” he said into the microphone before pulling out a two-litre bottle. He took a sip, smacked his lips together, and started wailing again like he had something to prove to himself.

He started and stopped a track he’d yet to play live. “The new ones are always scary,” he said before giving it another go.

It was the last Saturday night in February, and Amos Nadlersmith, a cow-punk slack-rocker from Boissevain, was a little bit overwhelmed by the crowd of at least 500 surrounding him at Festival du Voyageur.

Like an old married throuple

Sean Garrity, Jonas Chernick and Emily Hampshire have been doing it together for a long time.

Making romantic comedies, that is.

In 2012, the trio collaborated on the award-winning My Awkward Sexual Adventure, scripted by Chernick, an ex-Winnipegger, and directed by Garrity, who still calls the city home. That film centred on a sad-sack accountant (Chernick) who attempts to revive his sagging relationship with the guidance of an exotic dancer, played by Hampshire in a role that preceded her breakout as Stevie Budd on CBC’s Schitt’s Creek.

That film was a modest hit, and led producers to ask Garrity and Chernick to squeeze out another. Quickly, Chernick, who has starred in six of Garrity’s nine feature films, started writing a script that became The End of Sex, in theatres now.

Playwright mixes light into the darkness of serious subject matter

Before he became a playwright, Ori Black worked one of the most hectic, multifaceted and indescribable jobs known to humankind: he was a teenage Jewish summer-camp counsellor.

To be a camp counsellor is to be a friend, an unaccredited therapist, a surrogate sibling, an often-lifelong mentor, and on most days, a conflict-resolution specialist.

Whatever happens, the camp counsellor is in loco parentis, and it’s tough to wake up a lethargic teenager for breakfast when you’re still a lethargic teenager yourself.

At Camp Gesher in Cloyne, Ont., Black was a “late bloomer,” attending camp for the first time as a 14-year-old.

Motivated by fear

He’d rather not experience it, but failure excites the experimental theatre artist David Gagnon Walker.

“I think a lot of the most interesting artists are interested in reframing failure, fear and quote-unquote negative experiences as opportunities for magic to happen,” says Gagnon Walker, the performer and writer behind This Is the Story of a Child Ruled by Fear, a Theatre Projects Manitoba show running this weekend at Théâtre Cercle Molière.

Elio Zarrillo’s Volare loads the deck with family fun — and family feuds

It’s an actor’s job, however briefly, to become a different person.

During a game of scopa, a highly competitive Italian card game, Elio Zarrillo becomes a potty-mouthed, trash-talking machine running on overdrive.

“I’ll be playing with my partner, the love of my life, and she’s calling me an (unprintable word) and I’m calling her a dirty (unprintable word),” laughs Zarrillo, a local performer and the playwright of the family comedy-drama Volare, making its world première today at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

For Zarrillo, the 40-card game, composed of four suits — coins, swords, clubs and cups — is more than just a competition. “It represents tension, and joy, and it’s a place where people can say the gnarliest things they wouldn’t say elsewhere, but everyone knows it’s all in good fun,” says Zarrillo (who uses they/them pronouns), shuffling the deck with experienced hands and sipping Italian coffee.

Grief goes to Burning Man

After a death in the family, there is no shortage of roads to take. In grief, some amble slowly along a nostalgic, roundabout path, cobbled with stones of bittersweet memories. Others hit the freeway and avoid glancing up at the rearview mirror.

A year after her husband died in 2010, Dorothy Ouchi got into an RV and drove to the Nevada desert for the world’s largest outdoor arts festival: Burning Man.

Playwright Mieko Ouchi was caught off guard by her then-60-something mom’s idea, to say the least.

“She’s the kind of person you’d meet at HomeSense or Tim Hortons,” says Ouchi, the Edmonton-based playwright of Burning Mom, on at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre mainstage from April 27 through May 20. “Nothing about her screams, ‘I have a yearning to go to Burning Man.’ So that was part of the charm of the decision. It was just so unexpected.”

SiR’s 30th season offers Shakespeare plays written 400 years apart

SNOW was blowing outside his window Friday morning, but Shakespeare in the Ruins artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss was still dreaming about the company’s upcoming season of outdoor performances at Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park.

“Hopefully on opening night, we will be able to enjoy the weather,” he joked.

More than a century of meteorological record-keeping should give Beilfuss some peace of mind that when SiR’s season — the company’s 30th — kicks off June 1, only makeup, not snow, will powder the actors’ noses.

Beilfuss, who joined the company as artistic director in 2019, could hardly contain his excitement while discussing the season’s two shows: Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night (June 1-July 1) and playwright-performer Jessica B. Hill’s The Dark Lady (June 15-July 2).

Fundraising concert keeps late drummer’s light shining

Ten Aprils ago, three members of a Winnipeg rock band called the Revival played the type of gig no band ever dreams of playing.

Winnipeg singer sets his sights on ’80s-style stardom

Carlo Capobianco has a little secret he’s only recently begun to say out loud: he wants to be a pop star.

Each play becomes a journey unto itself

For MTYP artistic director Pablo Felices Luna, great theatre is all about the journey.

Sometimes, that journey is a physical one — transporting the audience into a new world, say, through an enchanted wardrobe. But always, the journey requires imagination, empathy and creative thinking — expanding our understanding of the world we live in while travelling into universes that have been lovingly crafted through the art of make-believe.

“You need to know where you come from before you understand what happens outside of that space,” says Felices Luna, now in his ninth season at MTYP’s helm.

If there’s one connective strand that unites the 2023-2024 season, announced Wednesday morning, it’s that: theatre as a transformative, transportative space for artists and audiences alike.

Theatre review: Yaga’s twisty tale of revenge takes over MTC stage

Kat Sandler’s Yaga begins and ends between the speckled branches of a placid birch-tree forest, where silhouettes dance in the fluttering dust, taking on new shapes as the angle of the moonlight shifts.

The forest is an anomalous locale, and an anonymizing one, as is the state of pure loneliness. Occupied by certain people — writers, musicians, artists, campers — the silent woods take on the form of a sylvan oasis, evoking a spirit of independence, inspiration and productivity — a place to find oneself. For others, living alone is an invitation for judgement and myth-making.

Brothers Baron staging FIINN concert to let fans in on financing of upcoming album

Making an album ain’t cheap, says John Baron, a third of the brotherly trio FIINN.

Which voice is witch?

Baba Yaga is an elderly woman, trailed wherever she goes by a caravan of fraying hair and an aura of mystery. Her face curled into an impish, devilish smirk, the folkloric character of Slavic tradition typically lives in a chicken-footed hut in the middle of remote forests in countries like Slovenia, Bulgaria or Ukraine.

A jingle dress to join ‘one family and all its relations’

A little over 10 years ago, Amanda Grieves faced a struggle to which each of us can relate: she didn’t know what to wear to the big ceremony.

Moon-based send-up of influencers speaks to all generations

Frances Koncan’s Space Girl is a story of firsts.

Teasing out the knots of our tangled web

The internet is everywhere.

What’s up

Andy and Norm take on the Burt

PTE’s new play does a mind meld on social media, TV, film and the internet

With bottles of Schweppes Ginger Ale nearby to soothe their parched vocal cords, the cast and crew of Frances Koncan’s new play at PTE, Space Girl, ran lines and discussed their character’s backstories a few weeks before the world premiere.

Winnipeg playwright’s ‘Narrow Bridge’ a living piece of theatre with innumerable lessons

In orthodox Jewish synagogues, there is a dividing line that separates women from men. It’s a practice steeped in thousands of years of tradition, and it is a decidedly important part of many people’s personal journey of focused prayer.

Personal and religious identity studied, questioned in playwright’s latest work

Is there anything more central to Judaism than asking questions?

What’s up

Celebrate International Women’s Day with the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra

Stereotypical he-said, she-said trope is deftly, rivetingly sidestepped in story of campus affair

Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes is a two-person show about authorship and the power dynamics at play during a tryst between a charismatic literature professor and his impressionable 19-year-old student, who happens to live right down the street.

‘Part of who I am’

Jedrick Thorassie always thought art could change a life. Lately, he’s had more reasons than ever to believe it.

What’s up

Winnipeg’s NAfro Dance is hosting a trio of performances this weekend that explore time and space. WAKATI, which translates to “time” in the Shaili language, is a collaboration between NAfro founder Casimiro Nhussi and Egyptian-born colleague Mohamed El Sayed. Each choreographer has created an original 30-minute piece with eight dancers and eight musicians focused on the program’s central theme.

What’s up

WAG-Qaumajuq and Manitoba Music celebrate Black History Month 

Pawn-shop ticket to ride

All kinds of things come in through the front door of a Main Street buy-and-sell shop: flat screen TVs, Blu-rays, DVDs, Playstations, XBoxes and bongs. Vintage amplifiers, hardly used sets of pliers, and old guitars — it sounds like a song.

What’s up: Belly laughs, beading and budget-friendly dining

Winnipeg Comedy Showcase celebrates nine years with 32nd show

Then there were three

Hailey Legary and Hailey Hunter needed a drummer.

Decades after playwright fought for her vision, 'Trouble in Mind' is still spreading influence

Cherissa Richards arrives early for her interview, and after getting acquainted with a boardroom on the second floor of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, the director sits down at the conference table, staring at a wall filled with faces from the past.

Stepping out of shadows

Statistically speaking, in your whole entire life, you have likely never met a single person on planet earth with the first name Fontine.

One-person emancipation proclamation

Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers: it’s a long title because it’s a long story, and to explain it in full would take Makambe K. Simamba far longer than one hour.

The town with no Towne

Yellow triangles, lime green rhombuses, red rectangles and sharp black lines criss-cross the dark blue carpet on the floor of Towne Cinema 8, the first standalone multiplex to open in Winnipeg and the latest to close its doors forever.

‘The hills are alive!’ at Royal MTC

Riding the momentum of its current production of Into the Woods, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre announced Friday the lineup of programming for its 2023-24 season.

Add this Winterruption to your social calendar

Some people view the coldest months of the year as a hibernation period for music festivals and concerts in Manitoba. Winterruption (Jan. 20-29) is out to wake those people up.

This metaphor is a window into the art of science

When she lowers herself to the ground, Jessica B. Hill takes the form of a human pretzel, tying her legs one over the other and wrapping her loping fingers through the looped arm of her coffee mug.

Out of a stressful visit to the dentist comes laughter, empathy in absurdist play Le Soulier

Nine out of 10 kids hate going to the dentist.

Playful invitation into world of feeling like an outsider

Jim Morrow grew up in Newfoundland, so he says he knows what it feels like to be different.

Award-winning musical contains too many lessons to count

Jack is just a young boy. He makes little mistakes. He stumbles over his words, and he questions himself constantly. He loves his mother, and he loves his dairy cow, Milky White.

But regardless of Jack’s (Chase Winnicky, with innocence) belief that Milky White is the greatest ungulate to ever chew its cud, his bovine friend, with her emaciated utters, can’t do her one job on the farm. So Jack’s mother (Mariam Bernstein, with reality in mind) sends her boy into the woods to sell the calf.

In a capitalist society, every beast of burden can be had in exchange for the right pile of magic beans. Buyer and seller beware.

Zambonis, Whistle Dogs and banana meatloaf

Time flies when you’re writing hundreds of stories on tight deadlines. The Free Press arts and life team wrote a lot of words about a whole lot of things in 2022. Before we turn the page on another year, we wanted to revisit some of our favourite stories from the last 365 days.

Cold cuts, cheese cubes and cinematic inspiration

Tavis Putnam was 17 when he lost his social virginity.

An artist thrives in a precious, temporary gallery space in the increasingly unaffordable art heart of the city

Jedrick Thorassie sits cross-legged on 123-year-old floorboards, surrounded by paintbrushes, finished works, and dozens upon dozens of sketchbooks, each page filled with the pictures he’s seen and the ones he’s created.

What Manitoba Sounded Like in 2022

PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS - Local act Taylor Janzen kicked things off Thursday night at the WInnipeg Folk Festival- - July 11, 2019.

Manitoba musicians captured the many moods of 2022

As every year comes to an end, we think about the things that carried us from January to December. For us, more often than not, they’re songs.

Winnipeg theatre stage legend Brownstone dies at 100

The grand dame of Winnipeg theatre has taken her final bow.

What’s up

Free Press virtual movie night

What’s up this week: Ads that pop, markets that pop up, comedy and Country Roads

Cannes Lions returns to the WAG-Qaumajuq

Small studio turned into a large shrine to the PTE's past

Carman Johnston, the director of development for Prairie Theatre Exchange, was tasked with the job this year to mark the semi-centennial anniversary of his organization, which began in a crumbling, gritty building on Princess Street in 1972.

Young actors find lots to admire in their beloved Peanuts characters at MTYP

Linus Van Pelt, Sally Brown and that little Beethoven fanatic Schroeder took a 15-minute break from rehearsal Wednesday afternoon to talk about their old pal Charlie Brown.

Longtime theatrical collaborators work together to craft solo performance

One Daniel is early and the other is late.

Readers help Free Press celebrate 150 years

Subscribers, contributors, supporters, and patrons of the Winnipeg Free Press gathered at the Winnipeg Art Gallery Wednesday night to celebrate the 150th birthday of a newspaper older than the city of Winnipeg itself.

What’s up this week: Festive First Fridays, Zoo Lights and Xmas with the King

First Fridays in the Exchange

Local band Hearing Trees’ new EP turns small talk into big sounds

“So I sit down at a bar in Kelowna,” Graham Hnatiuk says. “And I did the thing I usually do, which is put myself in a situation where something might happen.”

PTE staff past and present reflect on 50 years of theatre

Nine people walked into the Colin Jackson Theatre at Prairie Theatre Exchange Friday morning to pose for a picture, including the man the room was named for.

A Celtic Christmas to Disney heroes on ice: 5 fab events this week

Disney on Ice presents Find Your Hero

Yuk Yuk’s to tickle city’s funny bone again at the Fort Garry Hotel

The Fort Garry Hotel already has a spa, conference centre, and newly renovated restaurant and bar.

Newcomer experience in 1970s Winnipeg explored in Royal MTC’s latest production

Pamela Mala Sinha’s latest work, New, is a masterful portrait of loneliness, yearning, grief and marriage which blends snappy, Neil Simon-esque domestic dialogue with a dramatic sharpness rarely deployed in a play quite so funny.

None of the usual promotional blurbs are really happening

‘Did you know this is the corner where we’re all going to die?” Ellen Peterson asks, waiting for the perfect moment to cross the street at the nexus of Bannatyne Avenue, and the twin streets of Alfred and Albert.

‘Bad Parent’ playwright gives good advice

Playwright Ins Choi is a busy man, but he made time to chat via email with the Free Press about his career, his family and his latest production, Bad Parent, on now at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

Musical refugee tale asks ‘who’s Canadian enough?’

Ben Caplan and Christian Barry couldn’t look more different if they tried: Barry is clean-shaven and, to put it simply, Caplan is not. His beard is wild and his hair is wilder, while Barry’s fresh cut is hidden neatly inside a baseball cap.

Local director dares to drink the water in his Lake Winnipeg-set debut film

Long before he became a director, Erin Buelow was a boy swimming in Lake Winnipeg, drifting out from the pier in Matlock into the cold water.

Come From Away actor had a fishy initiation to Newfoundland culture

To get into character, actors prepare rigorously: they study dialects and movements and history, and delve into the deepest parts of their own personal lives to summon the emotions a role requires.

After a decade of playing with expectations, Winnipeg indie band Yes We Mystic is calling it quits

On any given telephone pole in Wolseley, there are posters advertising lost kittens, concerts or last weekend’s yard sale clinging to the wood, fixed in place by staples and tape. It’s a vertical collage, with layer upon layer of paper vying for attention.

What’s up

Darcy Oake at the Burt

Volleyball court a sandy setting for short film mulling land rights

A beach volleyball court doesn’t seem like the ideal place to stage a dance performance about Indigenous land rights — unless you’re Cameron Fraser-Monroe.

City’s fall theatre season brings a bumper crop of live delights

Well, summer is officially over. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but the changing of the seasons brings with it some benefits: the temporary utility of light jackets, the beautiful foliage on the trees and the satisfying crunch of the fallen leaves under our feet.

Winnipeg man skates to remember residential school victims

On the most famous street in Winnipeg, Alan Young stickhandles past invisible defenders. He dekes left, he dekes right, accelerating like the semi-trucks that speed past him before stopping gracefully at Portage Avenue and Sherbrook Street.

Songs in the key of love

Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick used to go to church together.

Running to conquer and reclaim

The winter winds were howling and snow was falling in 1967 when Charlie Bittern was tossed from the car and forced to run.

Ukrainian exhibit tells story of war through eyes of artists

‘Will I be fast enough to reach the bomb shelter?”

What’s up

Musical collision between Crash Test Dummies and the WSO

Dilawri uses surplus land to branch out into residential rental sector

When it comes to selling souped-up sedans and sensible SUVs, Ashok Dilawri knows the industry inside and out. The head honcho of his family’s group of dealerships started in the car sales world nearly 50 years ago, back when auto sales were a money-losing business and he was a newcomer to Winnipeg trying to make an honest living.

What’s up

Page One: Writers fest kickoff

Forks event aims to challenge stigma around substance use disorders

To recover from a substance use disorder, or addiction, is a tremendous task that can seem at times insurmountable, especially without the proper support and community, says Ian Rabb.

Comics, art book festivals highlight local creators with workshops, exhibits and more

KAPOW! Now that you’re paying attention: the Prairie Comics Festival is returning to Winnipeg this weekend at the West End Cultural Centre.

City brewery changing label out of respect for MMIWG crisis

A Winnipeg brewery is changing the label of one of its beers, recognizing the original branding could be seen as disrespectful in the context of Canada’s ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis.

For film prof Howard Curle, teaching was as important as listening and learning

Howard Curle was not the type of professor who bolted out the door the moment his lecture ended.

A daily rite in black and white (full text, without crossword clues)

They do it on the porch. They do it while masticating their breakfast. And sometimes, they do it while headed to their cabin in far-off oases, encircled by majestic birch trees, with the pitter-patter of a late summer rain hitting the windshield.

Some do it in pen. Others use pencil. “If I’m desperate, I’ll use lipstick,” says Jeni Wykes.

They swear at it. They anticipate it. They cackle at it. They stew over it. Sometimes, so much so they consider launching it across the room like a Soyuz rocket.

The blank squares mock them. They laugh at them. Ha! Good luck, they shout.

Sibling filmmakers’ quirky short vying for $30K prize

Siblings Taylor and Laina Brown live in the same house. As adults. With their partners. And get this: the two of them work together, too, doing something they’ve done since they were wearing Velcro shoes.

What’s up

Fantastic Beasts?

Deluxe apartment tower taking shape in Tuxedo

The owners of a shopping strip in the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood have identified the site of a longtime gas station on Corydon Avenue as an untapped residential resource.

Familiar tale takes on new hues in vibrant Rainbow Stage production

A tornado touched down and ripped the picket fence out from the ground. Farmhands struggled to hold onto their Stetsons. An old meanie on a bicycle went up into the sky without a ramp. And a young girl was transported from a small town in the middle of America to a lollipop forest in the middle of somewhere else.

Young filmmakers have 2 days to tell a story

Ben (Bendrix) Williams believes in the power of constraints. The local film professional is well aware that making movies takes time, but who says it needs to be six months, six years, or a decade? All you really need to make a good short film is 48 hours.

New ‘luxury affordable’ rental units snapped up in Osborne Village

Move-in week at Paragon Living’s latest Osborne Village apartment project will feel a little like orientation week at a university dormitory.

Organizers pull plug on upcoming Current Festival

A new Winnipeg music and culture festival announced its cancellation Monday morning, mere days before the event was set to begin.

Post-pandemic doldrums continue to grip Graham Avenue

Step into the time machine, and set the destination: Graham Avenue at Edmonton Street. Set the chronological target: summer 2019. Flick the switch, sit back and arrive in the past. Open the door, and what do you see?

Rainbow Resource Centre to develop LGBTTQ+ seniors’ housing in West Broadway

The Rainbow Resource Centre, the longest-running organization of its kind in Canada, is preparing to develop a 21-unit apartment complex in West Broadway for LGBTTQ+ seniors.

Halifax-based company acquires multiple city apartment buildings, pledging improved security, quality of life

Vida Living, a Halifax-based company, dipped its toes into Winnipeg’s apartment rental world early in the pandemic, purchasing one complex on Maryland Street and one on Ellice Avenue in December 2020.

A year and a half later, the company is diving in head-first.

Vida recently purchased eight apartment blocks spread across the city from Winnipeg-based Thorwin Properties, mostly in West Broadway and the Spence neighbourhood, for an investment of about $18 million.

The company now owns and manages 240 units in the city, with a total of $22 million invested already, says founder and CEO Ron Lovett.

Temporary theatres set up shop in vacant Portage Place storefronts during fringe festival

Matthew Evan Havens is delivering an hour-long monologue about royalty, war, magic and love, not far from where the blouses used to hang.

His stage is in what was most recently a women’s clothing shop on the second floor of Portage Place, a level of the downtown mall with more than half of its units empty, advertised to be leased.

All the maxi dresses are gone.

But for at least two weeks, two of the empty storefronts — one a former Suzy Shier shop, the other a Stitches outlet that perished in the pandemic — have tenants, though what they’re selling isn’t made of polyester and isn’t in direct competition with the Ardene or Dollarama down the hall.

Winnipeg Folk Festival founder remembered with tributes in song

An indisputable fact: the Winnipeg Folk Festival would not exist without Mitch Podolak’s contributions.

In 1974, he and a group of likeminded people — ie: socialists, communists and hippies — wanted to start a music and culture festival in a great big field to spread the good word of folk on the strength of taut banjo strings. Quickly, the fledgling organizers ran into an all-too-familiar problem: bureaucratic inertia.

The city wouldn’t say yes to backing the festival unless the province did the same. And when there was some dilly-dallying at the legislature, in Podolak’s son Leonard’s telling, his father did some reconnaissance.

On the desk of the provincial representative with whom the group was meeting, Podolak spotted some blank paper, topped with the ministerial letterhead.

Real estate investors drawn to industrial, office markets in ’Saskaboom’

A leading Winnipeg real estate asset management firm is expanding outside the province for the first time, targeting a future in the Land of the Living Skies: Saskatchewan.

MMI Asset Management president and CEO Martin McGarry said that while investment opportunities in Manitoba continue to exist, our nearest western neighbour was ripe for the picking when it came to industrial and office markets, which make up the bulk of MMI’s million square-foot portfolio here.

“There was a recent article in the Western Investor which called it a Saskaboom,” McGarry said in a phone call with the Free Press. The article referred to a highly competitive suburban office market in Saskatoon, with significant availability for investments in the city’s core office sector, where “double-digit vacancies” have created opportunities, which were in part spurred by the instability inherent to the pandemic.

“Whenever there’s upheaval in the market, there’s always opportunity to acquire and redevelop, though probably not to build anything new,” said McGarry, who also acts as the CEO of Cushman & Wakefield, and said the asset company has been eyeing Saskatchewan for a while.

Economic downturn forced Refinery District to adapt

Business in the Refinery District, a new residential development in the city’s south end, is finally booming.

Fifteen years ago, Hopewell Development Corp. bought the land — between Pembina Highway, Bishop Grandin Boulevard, Waverley Street and Chevrier Boulevard — for about $12 million, with aims to turn the 138-acre property into a commercial and box retail area akin to the Kenaston Commons. But after the recession of 2008 and with the retail plan looking grim, the idea shifted and the company moved toward a plan where residential real estate was key.

That took time and a considerable investment by the developer. New roadways, full servicing and the removal of truckload after truckload of lime mud, a non-toxic residue left behind by the land’s previous user — the Manitoba Sugar Co. — cost more than $60 million, and took two to three years, Hopewell’s chief operating officer Blair Rafoss said.

“It was a big risk to do as much as we did,” Rafoss said. But it was a necessary one: without those investments, the land was a hard sell to would-be developers, and Rafoss said the company had to set “the best mouse trap possible” for those interested parties.

Towne Cinema 8 to go dark in ‘temporary closure’

Downtown Winnipeg movie theatre Towne Cinema 8 will close next week for an indefinite intermission.

Patrons and employees were informed Thursday the long-running theatre would go dark July 7 — triggering worries the area was about to lose its sole multiplex.  

A spokesperson for owner Landmark Cinemas of Canada insisted, however, the Towne 8 would not be closing its doors for good.

“This is a temporary closure,” the spokesperson said in an email to the Free Press. “We are experiencing staffing challenges at our (Landmark Cinemas 8) Grant Park location and needed to reallocate resources to that location.”

Last developable property on Waterfront Drive now up for grabs

CentreVenture Development Corporation is accepting proposals for a parcel of land on Waterfront Drive, the final developable property on the downtown Winnipeg roadway which has grown from an idea into a reputable neighbourhood over the past two decades.

The 10,885 square-foot parcel is located at the intersection of Waterfront Drive and Heaton Avenue, and is currently being marketed to developers through a newly released request-for-proposals.

Angela Mathieson, the president and CEO of CentreVenture, said the property represented a milestone for the corporation, which operates at an arms-length from the city to market properties which were underutilized. In the early 2000s, she said, that’s exactly what the surplus lands which soon became Waterfront Drive was.

There was very little active business and even less residential opportunity in the area, but in 2000, the city moved forward with plans to develop and expand the area into a proper neighbourhood. “Not a lot was happening,” Mathieson said. An initial investment of $9 million came from the three levels of government to develop the drive.

Gimli International Film Festival to host 70 films, from around the world

Over 70 movies from around the world are visiting Manitoba this July to be screened at the Gimli International Film Festival.

There are films from Sweden, Japan, Finland, Chad, India, South Africa, Iceland, the U.S. and Norway, and of course a healthy contingent of Canadian content, with several Manitoba-made and produced films scheduled to roll across the screen from July 20-24.

As the programmers announced the list Thursday afternoon at the Fort Garry Hotel, they almost got tired, because there is simply so much to see, including Canadian coming-of-age dramas (Scarborough, Wildhood, Islands), a Cannes-winning black comedy (The Worst Person in the World), an Oscar-nominated documentary (Flee), and an extensive program of shorts.

And yes, executive director Alan Wong says, the free films on the beach — with a giant screen plunked into Lake Winnipeg — are back too.

A Hindi-speaking comedian walks into a bar…

The first jokes Rajat Kashyap told on stage were in Hindi. He was a young man living in Delhi, with an off-kilter sense of humour, and after some gentle encouragement from friends, he decided to stand up in front of a pub full of strangers and see whether he would die of embarrassment or revel in adoration.

He told “hack” jokes about being an engineer, and other “surface level” topics, but the audience ate it up. “I had a really good set, but the next time, I bombed horribly,” says Kashyap, 30. “I wondered how I could be so beloved one day and hated the next.”

The life of a comedian.

It was a good early lesson for Kashyap: stand-up is tough work. And he decided to make it somewhat tougher when he left India for Montreal, where he got a master’s degree in information studies from McGill University: he would perform not in Hindi, but in English, in the province of Quebec. Bonne chance!

Gentleman’s Guide puts a musical, satirical spin on class warfare

How far would you go to get what you want?

This ethical question forms the core of much pop culture, and in turn, much of our daily lives. Would you tell a white lie to get ahead at work? Transform your persona completely to impress a crush? Would you kill several relatives to acquire a vast fortune?

“I might think about how to spend the money,” says Donna Fletcher, the co-founder of Winnipeg theatre company Dry Cold Productions. “But I don’t think I’d consider bumping people off.”

That’s where she and Monty Navarro differ.

Solar-powered, self-sustaining, water-cycling, carbon-saving house for sale

Kim Chase sleeps in an Earthship. Do you?

It sounds like something drawn from the mind of Gene Roddenberry, or Jules Verne, but it is not science fiction. It is real, and it is somewhat spectacular: a solar-powered, self-sustaining, water-cycling, carbon-saving, Hydro-bill-rescuing house that doesn’t look or function anything like yours or your neighbours’.

The house is an 1800-square-foot bungalow, with slanted windows lining the entire south side, forming an atrium connected to each room while creating a constant source of light and energy for the terrestrial beings living inside. “Earthship” is a good name for it, and two years ago, Chase became its captain.

“I used to live in Wolseley, as all good granola groupies do,” said Chase, a group benefits professional who was looking for a change of scenery as retirement loomed in the distance.

Winnipeg art world makes its COVID comeback

Chicken was served and honours doled out Thursday at the Fort Garry Hotel, where a crowd of luminaries gathered for the annual Winnipeg Arts Council Awards, presented during the Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts.

Susan Lamberd was excited to see so many artists and people she admired all in the same room.

“You see Mayor Bowman, and you see the police chief, and all of these dignitaries,” says Lamberd, nominated for a Making a Difference Award for her work with Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba. “It felt a little bit intimidating.”

Lamberd likely wasn’t the only one feeling excited and a wee bit out of practice when it comes to attending galas: Thursday’s event was the first iteration since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the arts community the luncheon celebrates was thrown into disarray.

West Broadway tenants up in arms over prohibitive rent increase

Shortly after the hallways at a West Broadway apartment building got laminate flooring and a coat of grey paint, the tenants got a 14.3 per cent increase on their monthly rent.

Residents of 149 Langside St., overseen by Onyx Property Management, say those upgrades were not only unnecessary but wrong amid a pandemic which has significantly impacted the livelihood of the working-class residents who call the building home.

The increase in rent occurred June 1, despite the Residential Tenancies Branch’s recommendation of zero per cent rent increases for 2022 and 2023 — a policy informed by the labour precarity, economic inflation and financial strain associated with the pandemic, housing advocates say.

There are avenues for landlords to implement rent increases exceeding the recommended rate “if they can demonstrate that the guideline amount will not cover cost increases they have incurred.”

Chagalls’ timeless romance takes flight in WJT production

Marc Chagall took head-over-heels literally.

When the virtuosic artist was a young man in Vitebsk, in what is now called Belarus, when he was still called Moishe Shagal, he saw a young woman named Basha Rosenfeld and felt his feet lift. He was the son of a poor herring seller. She was a writer, the daughter of a jeweller. But when they met in 1909 — he was 22, she 19 — Chagall didn’t see their differences; he saw instead how they were dangerously alike.

“She is alone, completely alone,” wrote the artist, who died in 1985. “She is silent, me too. She looks — oh, her eyes! — I look too. As if we knew each other a long time ago, and she knows everything about me: my childhood, my present life and what will happen to me; as if she was always watching me, was somewhere nearby, although I saw her for the first time. And I realized: this was my wife.”

It took a few years for Chagall’s marital prophecy to be fulfilled, but in 1915, he danced the hora and called Basha his bride. That same year, Chagall captured the feeling of newlywed bliss in a painting he called Birthday. In it, Basha leans forward, lifted by a breeze of contentment, while Moyshe transcends the laws of physics and the conceit of anatomy to float overtop and behind his lover, craning his neck as if made of rubber to plant a kiss on her surprised lips.

Former downtown parking lot moving on up to become 14-storey apartment block

What was most recently a commercial parking lot in downtown Winnipeg will soon be home to a highrise apartment building with a 10,000-square-foot restaurant as its anchor tenant on the ground floor.

At the corner of Donald Street and St. Mary Avenue, former parking stalls in the 32,000-square-foot lot have been dug up and construction is underway on a 14-storey, mixed-use apartment block with 120 units, as well as a 100-stall above-ground parkade adjacent to the building.

The developer is Donmar Properties, with local firm NumberTEN providing prime architectural and design services. Akman Construction Ltd. is overseeing the project, and the company’s director of operations Jared Akman said it has been in the works for quite some time.

“We started planning this pre-pandemic,” he said. That meant over two years prior to construction beginning in March 2022.

Predict the future of a historical museum

Psst: the Manitoba Museum wants to listen to you.

Founded in 1972, the vaunted emporium of historical fact and scientific enlightenment is opening the floor to the public to help strategize for its next 50 years and beyond, says museum CEO Dorota Blumczynska.

Until July 31, the museum is collecting responses to a survey about the museum’s future and the priorities of its guests at manitobamuseumtomorrow.ca. The short survey will be an essential tool in gauging what the public wants out of the museum, where it is doing good work, and where it needs some realignment or improvement of its approach to curating the history of the province and the land.

Every visitor to the museum is looking for a specific experience, Blumczynska says. Some want to learn. Some want to be entertained. Some want to be propelled to action. Others may need a productive way to spend an afternoon. Regardless, it’s important for the museum to engage with guests about how those experiences can each be enhanced or adapted to fit modern expectations.

From soup to Peanuts: MTYP season has it all

For the first time since before the pandemic began, the Manitoba Theatre for Young People has announced a full seven-show season, set to carry the local institution from 2022 into 2023.

Artistic director Pablo Felices-Luna could hardly contain his excitement, given the difficult circumstances the past two years have presented to the theatre world. Over that stretch, the company trepidatiously announced a few shows here and there, facing unrelenting uncertainty. Now, a whole season of planned programming, announced all at once.

The season kicks off in October with an adaptation of Margery Williams’ classic story The Velveteen Rabbit, written by Purni Morell with music by Jason Carr. Felices-Luna calls it a magical tale of friendship, playfulness and imagination.

An annual highlight for the theatre is the holiday show, which this year will be a revival of a past favourite, A Charlie Brown Double Bill, featuring excerpts from the hit shows You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas; nobody is allergic to Peanuts when served up by Charles M. Schulz.

Asper, Paterson to be honoured at JNF gala

Gail Asper and Michael Paterson have more accolades than the average married couple. “Actually, Gail has received many honours, I have received very few,” Paterson says with a laugh.

Asper has the Order of Manitoba and is an officer of the Order of Canada, among other titles, and was a driving force in establishing the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. For years, Paterson has been at the forefront of water quality research in Manitoba, currently as chief research scientist for the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

Both do important work but they’ve never been honoured together.

That changes June 2, when the Jewish National Fund Manitoba & Saskatchewan will do so at its annual Negev Gala, recognizing their decades of contributions to the advancement of human rights and the study of the climate crisis — two of the most pressing issues facing the world at large.

Manitoba Métis Federation gets into residential game with 55-plus apartment complex in Selkirk

The Manitoba Métis Federation is building its first-ever apartment complex, announcing the development of an age-55-plus rental project in Selkirk to be completed by fall 2024.

For years, the MMF has been building single-family homes as well as duplexes and triplexes, but federation president David Chartrand said the Métis community needed more housing options for those who are aging and looking to live in smaller, more manageable residences.

“We know there’s a desperate need for senior housing,” Chartrand told the Free Press. “It can be very challenging to find a place to live, and the place has to have the proper situation for them personally (at that point in their lives.)”

The six-storey development on Selkirk’s Eveline Street will cost the MMF $14.8 million, Chartrand said, and will include 49 rental units, each of which will be accessible and available at affordable rates. Chartrand didn’t want to give an exact rent figure just yet. “But it’s going to be damn well affordable,” he said. “I will make sure it’s going to be affordable for my people.”

Curious students charmed by reptilian inhabitants of Narcisse Snake Dens

A bright yellow school bus pulls into the parking lot, and two species prepare to collide: Homo sapiens and Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis. Little kids, and even littler snakes.

“Are you ready to be wildlife explorers?” teacher Shannon Torcia asks shortly after the children - some of whom wear binoculars draped around their tiny necks — rush down the steps.

One little student, whose name happens to be Gage Little, wants one thing, and one thing only, out of this field trip. The nine-year-old student at Winnipeg Beach School wants to touch a snake. He wants one piece of living, breathing spaghetti to wrap itself around his wrist, slither gently up his arm, lift its head, stick out its splintered tongue, and greet him with a hiss. He and his schoolmates came to the right place.

“I would really just like to see how it feels,” he says.

New real estate group head ready to take reins

The Manitoba Real Estate Association has appointed a new president for the 2022-2023 term: Steinbach-area realtor Julie Friesen.

Friesen, the manager broker at Delta Real Estate Steinbach, takes the reins from outgoing president Stewart Elston, and said her primary goals are the same as his were, namely to continue pushing the organization toward accomplishing its long-term goals.

Those include expanding education about real estate tailored to industry professionals and members of the public considering work in the field; to evolve digital communications and social-media engagement; and to work with the government to advocate for greater housing affordability and supply.

For Friesen, the appointment is a chance to build on the work she’d done during previous stints on the MREA board as a treasurer and a director-at-large, volunteer roles which she said opened the door to the association’s presidency.

Venerable spots hit Winnipeg market

Winnipeg’s commercial real estate sector is always busy. Here is a brief round-up of interesting listings in the city.

More like Sell-kirk AvenueIn the market for a commercial building in the city? Give Selkirk Avenue a look.

One of the North End’s most venerable corridors, Selkirk plays host to dozens of decades-old businesses, and at the moment, there are a number of free-standing buildings up for sale all at once.

On the 400 block, and on the extremely low end of the price spectrum, the building which for decades has housed the Giant Food Mart is listed for $45,000, with all equipment and fixtures included. One block away, at 581 & 583 Selkirk Ave. a multi-unit brick building with two street-level commercial units and a pair of two-bedroom apartments on the second floor is listed for $399,000.

Real-time invention

‘What you’re about to see will never be seen again,” promises Toby Hughes, a member of the veteran troupe Outside Joke. In comedy, truth is everything, and Hughes tells no lie: they’re about to create an improvised musical in the style of film noir, set in cottage country.

The troupe’s new show is titled The Improvised Musical, which promises two hours of improv fed by audience suggestions. On this night, three generations gather at an A-frame cabin — or is it a cottage? — on a lake as pristine as it is shallow, with dark secrets atwirl in the waters. There is forbidden romance, a sexy stepmother wearing a child-sized Little Mermaid bikini, and a pack of beavers looking to avenge their ancestors, who were murdered — gasp — on this very lake many moons ago.

And soon, a dead body washes up ashore. “Like a corpse,” one performer remarks.

It’s Randy, the family’s daughter’s new boyfriend. With a pronounced J-stroke, Detective Rick Moody canoes up to the dock to investigate. He’s never seen pictures of Randy alive, he tells someone. “Only the autopsy report,” he grunts. “When he was puffy.”

Jamboree’s slow, steady path back to the stage

It will be a long-awaited celebration for Jamboree Thursday night when the Winnipeg indie trio finally gets to release its album Life in the Dome to the world in the way they intended: at a concert filled with people losing and finding themselves in the music.

Long-awaited for a few reasons: it’s been about eight months since the band last played a live show; it’s been about 20 months since they’ve played a live show indoors; it’s been nearly two years since many of the now-finished tracks were first recorded as demos.

And, it’s been one month since their planned album release — on April 1 — was postponed by an unsavoury April Fools joke when COVID infections sidelined several members of the opening bands, plus members of the band they brought in as a last-minute replacement.

“That was an unlucky stroke there,” says Alex Braun who plays with Nick Lavich and Sky Parenteau in one of the city’s brightest up-and-coming bands. “It seemed like the gods didn’t want it to happen.”

New housing project offers health-care workers a place to hang their hats near hospital

When Dr. Hossein Kashefi was a resident at Health Sciences Centre a decade ago, he was also a resident of a very outdated, very small apartment a few blocks away.

The unit was not much, but the building it was in still had a lengthy waitlist of medical professionals. For downtown health-care students looking for accommodations near their place of work and study, the pickings were relatively slim. And so Kashefi and his wife Shima Amel-Gharib, then a dental student at the U of M, took what they could get when they first arrived in Winnipeg.

It felt strange to Kashefi that hundreds of hospital workers and students had such limited options for modern accommodations nearby. Many had to endure exhausting commutes from across the city to get to and from work. Wouldn’t it be nice, the couple thought, if there was a way to bring home a little closer to work, and at an affordable price?

It took some time, but they’re closer to realizing that goal: they are developing a 45-unit apartment building on Notre Dame Avenue in front of the hospital’s Tecumseh parkade, on a lot that had previously served as an unofficial parking lot. Construction is well underway.

Building a sense of belonging

Last spring, the Noble Court Apartments on Alfred Avenue were in shambles. The North End block’s windows were cracked, brick walls were spattered with graffiti, and there was evidence everywhere of a fire that nearly destroyed the building a half-decade earlier.

The 107-year-old block had seen better days.

One year later, it’s fair to say the old apartments have better days ahead.

Shawenim Abinoojii Inc., an Indigenous-led, not-for-profit service organization, purchased the building in 2021, and began overseeing a massive renovation of the once-dilapidated property in the city’s North End. The vision was to transform the building into a housing hub for as many as 24 southeast First Nations youth transitioning out of child and family services, while also housing on-site programming, support services and office space.

Company eager to bring the Bard to live audiences

Here’s much ado about something.

Since 2019, Shakespeare in the Ruins has been thrust offstage by the global pandemic, unable to perform as usual at the Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park, instead using the internet to bring the Bard to the world.

But this spring, the local theatre production company is returning to live performance, hoping to make the past two years a prologue for an ambitious slate of theatre moving forward.

The company will mount a performance of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and an original production called The Player King, written by Ron Pederson, a Canadian comedian-improviser and theatre director. Tickets are on sale at www.shakespeareintheruins.com. One stub for Much Ado is going for $35; one for The Player King is $20.

Downtown building once headquarters of prominent architecture firm is for sale

A downtown office building designed by one of the most prominent architecture firms in Winnipeg’s history is up for sale.

Located at 222 Osborne St. N., the former headquarters of Green Blankstein Russell and Associates — which designed dozens of buildings in Winnipeg, including the current city hall, the former Winnipeg International Airport, the Manitoba Museum and Planetarium, the Wildwood Park housing development and the Centennial Concert Hall — is listed for $2.4 million.

The building on Osborne, designed by the firm, was built in 1951, and many of their more prominent designs originated within its mid-century modern style offices, which the firm would occupy until 1983.

In the nearly 40 years since, the free-standing, two-storey building has been occupied by a number of private businesses, including currently a law firm, a home-care business and an immigration specialist. It’s undergone significant renovations, says Capital Group senior director of sales and leasing Bob Antymniuk, and is available for purchase and has space for lease.

Royal Canadian Legion Branch #141 searching for a new home after building sold

The Royal Canadian Legion Branch building on Selkirk Avenue has been sold, with members citing dwindling membership and rising maintenance costs as reasons for the change in ownership.

For over 70 years, the Ukrainian Canadian Veterans Branch was a social hub on Selkirk Avenue, with thousands of members, veterans and acquaintances visiting the facility annually for events or just to enjoy the company of others. When Pope John Paul II visited the city in the 1980s, he made a stop at the legion to say hello.

“It truly was a second home for us,” said JoAnne Barkley, the branch’s acting president, a few days after the hall hosted an open house for community members to say goodbye.

But the membership, which once numbered in the hundreds, has fallen, while upkeep became expensive, forcing the legion’s leadership to consider and accept a sale of the building amid what has been a difficult stretch for legions Canada-wide.

Kidsfest set to deliver live laughter at The Forks in June

Neal Rempel has an interesting word to describe this year’s edition of Kidsfest, which returns to Winnipeg June 9-12 for live programming.

“It’s going to be awesomepants,” says the festival’s longtime executive director.

For the last two years, the awesomepants had to be hemmed to fit an unfriendly situation: the pandemic meant the annual family programming extravaganza had to look to alternative methods of delivering children’s entertainment.

In 2021, brilliantly, that meant hosting a drive-in version at the Red River Exhibition grounds. And while kids — and their harried parents — were grateful to watch those shows from afar, Rempel says he’s extremely excited to bring the festival back to its usual live format this year, with shows, workshops and roving performers scheduled to take over the CN Stage at The Forks as well as the Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

Province commits funds for RWB campus plan

Premier Heather Stefanson went to the ballet Wednesday afternoon — announcing $7.5 million in provincial funding toward the expansion and modernization of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s downtown campus.

The funding will help the downtown cultural institution make critical upgrades and improvements in areas such as efficiency, conservation of energy, accessibility, safety and artistic possibilities, the premier said.

The RWB plan includes new living facilities for its boarding students, as well as a modern 3,400-square-foot studio for the use of more than 1,500 dancers in the organization’s professional and recreational divisions.

Before taking centre stage, Stefanson sat in the front row beside RWB school director Stéphane Léonard for a brief performance by the ballet’s professionals, choreographed by Cameron Fraser-Monroe and set to music by Jeremy Dutcher.

Shops of Kildonan Mile project will also include luxury lodgings

Local developer Shindico aims to begin work by next spring on the Shops of Kildonan Mile, a project featuring over 500,000 square feet of luxury apartments and over three million square feet of retail space.

The company touts the development as the “first substantial retail growth in over a decade” at the node of Regent Avenue and Lagimodiere Boulevard.

President Sandy Shindleman said the project has been in the works for the better part of a decade, and that over time, the project’s scope and desires have changed as the market has shifted.

Plans began centred on big-box retail, but Shindleman said there has been less demand for that in the area, which already has its fair share. Now, the idea is to develop residential apartments — about 150 to start, though that could increase, he said — along with retailers who fill “everyday needs.” That includes a mix of food service, clothing and other necessities, and service-based tenants, such as dental clinics or salons.

Indian City carries spirit of founding member onstage

A decade ago, musician Vince Fontaine had a vision for a new project: a collective of Indigenous artists coming together to create a soundtrack to Winnipeg’s past and future, reflecting on life in the city — its virtues and its problems.

Indian City was born.

“He looked at Winnipeg as an Indian City,” says friend and bandmate Lawrence (Spatch) Mulhall, who played with Fontaine in both Indian City and Eagle and Hawk. “He wanted everyone to come together and move forward. He was a leader, a songwriter. He always had a vision.”

As a collective, Indian City had a shifting membership: musicians and vocalists came and went, some moving on to focus on solo careers but never straying too far from the band’s central node. Things changed, as was always the plan.

Scarcity of residential stock drives prices up in market skewed to the seller

There is no shortage of hunger for residential property in Winnipeg.

But there is a shortage of available residential property.

According to the most recent market statistics from the Winnipeg Regional Real Estate Board, a lack of available listing supply has hamstrung the local industry, which has experienced an accelerated market for nearly two years. There has been so much interest in residential real estate and so little supply that the market has become one that skews heavily toward favouring sellers, with many of the available properties regularly selling well above list price.

Despite being above the five-year average of sales for the month of February, total sales were down 22 per cent over the same stretch last year. That’s not due to lack of would-be buyers: new listings were down 19 per cent over last February, and as of the end of the month, there were 31 per cent fewer active listings available from the year prior.

The Winnipeg Comedy Fest will see you now

In comedy, timing is everything.

Historically for the Winnipeg Comedy Fest, springtime has been festival time, but in 2020 and 2021, the iconic local event ran a smaller-than-usual program during the fall. The rescheduled shows were much appreciated, but when they happened, they still felt abnormal to artistic director Dean Jenkinson.

In 2022, Jenkinson says the time is right for the festival to return to its normal schedule, kicking off with several star-studded comedy showcases across the city from May 2-9, with locally and nationally renowned comics providing a much needed dose of laughter to anyone who buys a ticket.

“We’ve always been a springtime festival,” says Jenkinson, who became artistic director in the 2019, meaning this will be his first ‘regular’ festival at the helm. “And this year, we’re trying to get back to normal.”

New real estate board president takes helm at time of great change and demand

Akash Bedi was given an interesting start date for his term as president of the Winnipeg Regional Real Estate Board: Jan. 1, 2022.

Yes, it was a chance to begin the new year in an exciting fashion, by beginning to lead the 11-person board of directors and represent the organization’s 2,200 members right as the new calendar was flipped open.

But the first day of the year also coincided with a major shift for local realtors, aside from a new president taking charge: the implementation of the Real Estate Services Act, a long-planned update to the decades-old Real Estate Brokers Act, representing several key changes to how realtors in the province do business.

Though the change had been advertised in 2021, and training to help brokers address the changes had already been underway, there was still some confusion from industry pros, who quickly gave the new president a jingle.

Kids films deliver universal messages with magic, humour

Almost 30 years ago, Pascal Boutroy was working as a film critic in Montreal, writing about directors such as Pedro Almodóvar and Derek Jarman, reviewing serious movies made for serious grown-ups.

Then, something changed. Boutroy and his wife, Nicole Matiation, had their first child.

Suddenly, grown-up movies made way for movies made for kids.

Boutroy remembers the first “kids” movie that stopped him in his tracks after becoming a dad, 1993’s Kalle and the Angels, which he saw at a festival. The Norwegian film was about a young boy whose father, an environmental activist, dies. While grieving, the boy is visited by an angel, who asks for the boy’s help: his father refuses to go to heaven until the environment is saved.

Campaign puts spotlight on Black Canadian artists

The late local musician Gerry Atwell, groundbreaking poet Dionne Brand, award-winning video artist Kapwani Kiwanga, tap dancing legend Joey Hollingsworth, the pioneering actor Johanne Harrelle.

What do they all have in common?

Each has been put under the spotlight in the second annual “Know Their Names” campaign, a local project aimed at highlighting Black Canadians and their contributions to various fields during Black History Month.

This February, the field of choice was art, and Black History Manitoba — which partnered with local clothing company Zueike and city councillor Markus Chambers on the project — had no shortage of figures to choose from. The hardest part was likely narrowing the field down to fit onto the back of a T-shirt.

Rental vacancy on the rise

Winnipeg’s vacancy rate for rental apartments is higher than it’s been in 25 years, according to the most recent national market report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, published Feb. 18.

In 2020, that rate was 3.8 per cent, but leaped to five per cent in 2021, according to analysis by the CMHC’s Heather Bowyer. Key drivers for that increase include lags in the labour market, population flows and overall economic conditions, which have contributed to weaker demand for rental units, the report notes.

However, a significant increase in rental supply has boosted the vacancy rate even further. Within the Winnipeg central metropolitan area, 2,915 units were added to what the CMHC refers to as the “purpose-built rental universe.” That’s the largest annual increase ever since data was first collected in 1990, with units under construction up 30 per cent, year over year, as of last October.

But according to the report, that increase in supply has not led to an increase in affordability. Rather, the opposite. “While there is a need for more affordable units, new supply coming on to the market posts higher average rents,” the report notes. For those in the quintile with the lowest income — those earning less than $25,000 per year — an “affordable” rent would be less than $625 per month.

The Point on Pembina will connect to the neighbourhood’s past

A new apartment block is coming to one of Winnipeg’s largest and busiest transit and traffic corridors, and it’s being built on the former site of the Fort Garry branch of the Royal Canadian Legion.

Last year, the legion, which operated at 1125 Pembina Hwy., since 1949, signed a lease to take over a former Pizza Hut building down the road, meaning that for the first time in 72 years, something else will sit in place of Branch 90’s hall at the corner of Pembina and Windermere.

It was an opportunity too good to pass up, says Kurtis Sawatzky, the prime consultant and project manager of the Point on Pembina. Foundation work has already started on the 82-unit apartment block, to be developed by Foresight Development Group, built by Bouchard Brothers, completed by the fall of 2023.

What made it so appealing? Sawatzky — a structural engineer and partner in KNH Sawatzky & Associates — said it was the potential to develop needed new rental housing stock within the area and not in greenfields, creating greater density. That, he said, aligned with the city’s infill guidelines for mature neighbourhoods, which is essential to combating sprawl.

Blazes erase history, sometimes before it even gets started

Realtor Nick Khinda was heading east down Portage Avenue Wednesday afternoon to take a water reading at a building he was selling when he saw the smoke. Then, he saw the fire trucks, the hoses and the police cars blocking off traffic in either direction from the block where he was headed. It was not what he expected to see, and he had to find out what was going on.

So Khinda rerouted, and came toward Portage down Langside Street, parking his SUV in a lot near the point from which the smoke was billowing. He got out of his car to ascertain whether it was his listing on fire, or if the blaze was emanating from elsewhere, which turned out to be the case.

“I was thinking, (it’s) not our building,” he said as he — like many others in downtown Winnipeg — watched the multi-use Kirkwood Block, at the corner of Portage and Langside, burn. So he called his client, sending him video footage of the fire as it happened essentially next door to their property. “He was as surprised as I was.”

Even though the building on fire was not the one Khinda had come to check, he was concerned and upset by what he was watching. “When you see a disaster like this, you have to feel sorry for whoever is involved,” he said.

Journalist hunts for answers about great-grandmother’s unsolved murder

Sarah Feinstein, Wayne Hoffman’s great-grandmother, was sitting on her Magnus Avenue porch in the middle of the 1913 winter, breastfeeding her daughter, when a sniper rolled past the house and opened fire, killing her but leaving the baby at her breast unharmed.

“That’s the story my mother grew up hearing,” says Hoffman, a journalist and the executive editor of Tablet, a daily online Jewish-interest magazine headquartered in New York.

But the stories we grow up hearing are often well-honed, massaged or tidied up to cover uncomfortable truths. And this one was so dark that over many generations it was repeated with little suspicion or doubt.

Hoffman’s mother had been tipped off to her grandmother’s murder when she was a child and when she noticed a strange woman standing next to her grandfather in an old photograph. She had met her grandmother, and this woman was not her. So she asked her mom, who gave her a startling reply, followed by an even more shocking one. “The woman you think is your grandmother is my stepmother,” she told Hoffman. “And when I was very little, my mother was sitting outside on the front porch in winter in Winnipeg when a sniper came by…”

Local band Leaf Rapids sides with Neil Young, quits Spotify

Keri Latimer is done using Spotify, and so is her band.

Latimer, a member of the Canadian Music Award-nominated group Leaf Rapids, says her family has used the streaming service to listen to music, along with about 172 million paying subscribers worldwide. Meanwhile, Leaf Rapids — Keri and Devin Latimer, Joanna Miller and Chris Dunn — has used the service as a vehicle to share their unique blend of roots and folk with the world for half a decade.

Not anymore.

“We had been contemplating making this choice for a while, and this seemed like the right time,” Latimer said on the phone Tuesday.

Health concerns force cancellation of PTE production

The newest production of Canadian playwright Ins Choi (Kim’s Convenience) is called Bad Parent, and it’s about a couple experiencing the tribulations of ushering a newborn into the world during a stressful time in their lives.

It’s a humorous, honest, vulnerable play, says Prairie Theatre Exchange artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones. But without intention, and beyond anyone’s control, the plot has become a metaphor for the production of the infant play itself: the pandemic delayed plans for an international debut on PTE’s stage in 2020, and after rescheduling the run for March 2022, the company made the decision to cancel it yet again earlier this week.

Jones said the play is a co-production between PTE, the Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre and Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company, and would require cast and personnel to travel to Winnipeg for the shows. That led to a difficult choice to cancel the Winnipeg productions, with shows in Vancouver and Toronto still set to go on.

“For us as a company, we were in an impossible position, because it looks like things may get better soon, but the definition of ‘soon’ is elusive,” said Jones, who said health (human, financial and artistic) was the main consideration in the decision.

New building to blend affordable apartments with market-priced suites in St. Boniface

In November 2012, a charitable organization purchased an empty plot on Marion Street, hoping to use it to address what was already an obvious crisis in Winnipeg: a shortage of quality affordable housing.

The Catholic Health Corp. of Manitoba, since renamed the Réseau Compassion Network, at that point was witnessing an influx of new Canadians struggling to find adequate places to live, so they bought the land just down the road from the Norwood Hotel to build a housing complex.

For the past several years, 156 Marion St. been used as a surface parking lot for visitors to the nearby hospital. “We’ve attempted to do something with it over the years, but the conditions were never favourable for us,” said Bob Lafreniere, the network’s chief financial officer. From a funding perspective, the organization was fighting an uphill battle.

Meanwhile, the affordable housing crisis in the city did not go away. According to a decade-old report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the average rent for a one-bedroom Winnipeg apartment in April 2012 was $697; in January 2022, that average reached $1,165, per rentals.ca, representing a 67 per cent increase over a 10-year span during which the minimum wage in Manitoba only increased by 16 per cent to its current $11.95, well below what would be classified a living wage based on market conditions. Plus, this pandemic has certainly not made things easier for the renting Manitoban.

Filmmaker’s long wait over

Leona Krahn has been waiting to watch her latest documentary on the big screen for what feels like an eternity.

In reality, it’s been about 18 months.

Vivi’s Vision, Krahn’s documentary following Vivi Dabee as she navigates the ups and downs of her first Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival production, was shot from February to July of 2019, tracking Dabee’s efforts to get her work from page to stage.

Krahn, a veteran documentarian, asked if she could tag along throughout Dabee’s creative process, and was surprised the academic-turned-playwright said yes. What followed was an illuminating look into the twists and hurdles involved with mounting a production, including an ongoing shuffle of directors and the usual troubles — stress, pressure, anxiety — which usually accompany creative work. Plus, Dabee navigated the situation from her perspective as a blind person, which highlighted some of the barriers people with different abilities face in the theatre world in order to attain success.

Industrial sector still going strong; office market remains uncertain

The year 2022 begins much the same as 2021 did for the local commercial real estate industry: with a strong outlook for the industrial sector and an uncertain future for the office world.

According to real estate firm CBRE’s Q4 report, the two market segments are experiencing vastly different scenarios that will likely be magnified by the continued influence and demands of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

On the industrial side, the availability rate dropped by year’s end to 3.2 per cent, a level that hasn’t been reached since 2018 that signals very high demand for industrial space. Meanwhile, CBRE’s figures state that annual net absorption reached 752,000 square-feet in 2021, a higher amount than in any of the past five years.

“I think our industrial market is in many ways in line with what we’re seeing across the country,” said CBRE Winnipeg vice-president Paul Kornelsen, who said the increased demand is due to an ever-adapting supply chain that’s shifted a greater amount of attention to distribution and warehousing.

With the start of 2022 comes a new framework for Manitoba’s real estate industry

New year, new rules for Manitoba real estate.

On Jan. 1, the Real Estate Services Act came into effect in the province, bringing with it an updated regulatory framework for the local industry to follow, along with some key changes for parties on either side of a real estate transaction.

One of the most notable changes to consumers is likely the introduction of a service agreement requirement: any buyers, sellers, or renters of residential or commercial properties are now required to sign such an agreement with a realtor prior to any services being rendered. But there are other moves that will impact real estate business moving forward.

The regulatory Manitoba Securities Commission’s real estate division consulted with industry groups such as the Manitoba Real Estate Association in drafting the legislation, which replaces the Real Estate Brokers Act, and which the commission’s website says “reflects the changing face” of the provincial real estate landscape.

Real estate still flying high

Real estate professionals love similes, and in Winnipeg’s real estate industry, 2021 felt an awful lot like an airplane: soaring high, though not without some turbulence along the way.

On the residential side, it was a smooth flight with stellar views, according to Peter Squire, the vice-president of external communications for the Winnipeg Regional Real Estate Board. Asked to sum up the year that was, Squire was effusive. “I’d have to say it’s been nothing short of spectacular in terms of the activity generated since the beginning of 2021,” he said.

The year saw the residential real estate sector maintain trends that began in 2020, with a 13-month long span of record-setting sales ending in July 2021 lifting the market to new heights. After that, the sales pace slowed down for a few months, but as the year came to a close, it sprang back: November 2021 was the best November on record for the local multiple listings service.

Squire and others weren’t surprised to see a strong 2020 — which was the second consecutive record-setting year in terms of sales and dollar volume — supplanted by a third straight best-ever showing in 2021. But that doesn’t make the numbers any less impressive to behold: there were over 18,500 sales on the multiple listing services, smashing the previous year’s record of just over 16,000, while dollar volume for the year ended at nearly $6 billion, representing an increase of over $1 billion compared to 2020 data.

How taking pictures of Winnipeg’s basketball nets kept me moderately sane in 2021

If I’m heading to meet someone for noon, I get there at 11:30, because I like to “give myself time.” Sometimes that means sitting by myself and listening to music, but over the last 12 months, it’s usually meant doing something a bit harder to explain: walking down back alleys and looking for basketball hoops.

It all started in November 2020, when I was working on a story for the Free Press about families setting up backyard hockey rinks ahead of our first full pandemic winter. I climbed into my car with my girlfriend, and we parked on McMillan Avenue. Then, we split up, looking for rinks. If she saw any, she’d text me the address, and then I’d go and knock on the door, or in some cases, leave a note.

After finding several rinks, we decided to stroll down a back lane to see if we’d missed any. It was then that I saw something affixed to a garage that rendered me slack-jawed, and forced me to kneel down on the ground like a fashion photographer asking his subject to give him more, more, more: a yellow Dairyland milk crate with the bottom cut out.

The crate stopped me in my tracks. There was little doubt in my mind that whichever family lived in this house in this wealthy neighbourhood could have afforded the latest NBA-quality backboard. But instead, a milk crate with the bottom cut out, a throwback to the days of the milkman and to the 1890s, when Dr. James Naismith cut a hole in the bottom of a peach basket, thus inventing the game of basketball, a sport that has consumed me since I was an 11-year-old watching the Phoenix Suns’ Steve Nash toss alley-oops to Amare Stoudemire.

Historically significant hotel and heritage building for sale

A well-known inn and entertainment venue in Winnipeg’s French-speaking neighbourhood of St. Boniface is up for sale, listed for a cool $1.79 million.

The St. Boniface Hotel, at 171 Dumoulin St., has long been a busy spot for live entertainment in the area, showcasing bands and musical performers on a consistent basis at its Club St. B venue for decades. The space has hosted everything from arm-wrestling competitions to the Festival du Voyageur’s Voyageur Games. Plus, each of its seven rooms are rented, according to the listing by realtor Al Chopra of Landmhel Real Estate Services, who has interest in the property.

Occupying a prime lot near St. Boniface’s central business area, the yellow-and-black building sits on more than 12,000 square feet, and the price-tag includes not just the building, but the land and all equipment on site.

The current hotel is not the first one on the property: the previous iteration of the St. Boniface Hotel ended in flames.

More art in the heart of the Exchange

When a new business opens, it can be tough for customers to find it. One solution: paint the door pink, teal and orange.

That’s what Sholeth Choquette, 22, and Paul Sogeke, 25, did in September when they opened Seduta Art, one of the newest shops in the Exchange District. It’s a fitting advertisement for the Arthur Street establishment, a gallery which sells hard-to-find and high quality supplies — if you sell art, why not let the door do some of the talking?

But rest assured, the co-owners know what they’re talking about, too.

Both are art lovers and artists themselves, but are also graduates of the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business, where Choquette studied supply chain management and entrepreneurship and Sogeke studied finance and accounting. Walk into the store, and the pair will explain what every product can be used for, muse about the art they’ve got hanging up, and hand out their business cards — postcard-size prints of famous paintings.

Grassie project clears hurdle

The ongoing saga of a proposed residential complex in Transcona reached an emotional crescendo at Friday’s meeting of the East Kildonan-Transcona community committee, which ultimately approved a variance for the project with added traffic calming and safety considerations.

On Nov. 22, the committee held a marathon meeting and public hearing that lasted nearly eight hours, with much of the conversation centred on rezoning, subdivision, and variances for the development at 307 and 311 Grassie Blvd., a project that had already been scaled back from 120 units on six storeys to 72 units on four owing to community feedback.

The bulk of the opposition from community members concerned the potential impact on traffic at the development site, just east of Lagimodiere Boulevard, and the proposal’s single entry and exit way, which residents figured would lead to snarls on Grassie. Those concerns dovetailed with fears over pedestrian safety, some residents said.

At that meeting, Russ Wyatt, the former area councillor, now working as a consultant for the property owner, presented an independent study that found the development would have negligible impacts on traffic volumes. He told those in attendance that the project had “the essence of a good infill project” and would densify the community, the Canstar publication the Herald reported.

Dedicated to fixing the world

Hundreds of thousands of people in Winnipeg have Monte Raber to thank for their health and safety. Most of them don’t even know his name.

That’s the way he wanted it.

In 1959, at the age of 24, Raber started the biomedical engineering department at the Winnipeg General Hospital without a roadmap. Some hospital brass didn’t understand why such a department was necessary: medicine was medicine. But Raber understood that the field was changing, that through proper systems design and careful planning, fatality could be avoided, and that technology held the key to saving lives.

Despite initial skepticism, Raber trudged forth and developed state-of-the-art monitoring systems for the hospital’s intensive-care unit. Raber’s system was groundbreaking: it monitored six vital signs simultaneously in independent modules, and if any took a turn for the worse, an alarm would sound that could only be turned off manually by a nurse.

CKSB marks 75th anniversary with a celebration

When Leo Dufault was six years old, he came home from school in St. Boniface and listened to the children’s programs on CKSB-AM, the Francophone radio station. And when he says listened, he means listened.

“One day, the announcer (Leo Brodeur) told the listeners, “Come and visit me,” Dufault says, recalling a moment from 1956.

So Dufault left his house, on a mission, and ended up at the front door of the studio on Langevin Street. Feeling no anxiety, he opened the door. “Where’s the announcer?” he asked in French. A few minutes later, he was in the broadcast booth, being interviewed live on the air by Brodeur himself.

Countless St. Boniface residents remember those early days of CKSB, which in 1946 became the first French language station to operate in Western Canada, with supporters crowdfunding to make its existence a reality. From the moment it broadcast its first transmissions on May 27, 1946, the station became a cornerstone of a flourishing French-speaking community, as Dufault calls it, a miracle.

Impact concerns remain as silica plan pivots from fracking to solar power

A Canadian company previously engaged in hydraulic fracturing is pivoting to solar glass production, and has chosen Selkirk as the base of its manufacturing operations.

Alberta’s Canadian Premium Sands Inc., and the City of Selkirk announced the plans last week.

The move toward solar panel glass production is considered by the city to align with its sustainability mandate, and will create an estimated 300 jobs, while the company said the move toward solar panel development made strong business sense. Selkirk director of sustainable economic development Tim Feduniw called it “potentially the largest single industrial investment in the last 100 years in Selkirk."

When Canadian Premium Sands first received approved quarry leases in Seymourville, located about 160 kilometres north of Selkirk on the territory of Hollow Water First Nation, the company intended to use the silica sand deposits in fracking — a process in which silica sand particles are injected into the earth to extract resources.

MTYP moseys back onto the scene with outdoor show

Manitoba Theatre for Young People is back, with its first production in nearly two years kicking off today at — but not inside — the company’s theatre.

The Midwinter Mosey is exactly as it sounds: a waltz around the MTYP building at The Forks, with snow on the ground, as a talented cast performs wintry scenes starring Charlie Brown and the Peanuts Gang, Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood, and the beloved Frog and Toad.

“We lovingly refer to it as an outdoor promenade show for short little legs,” says Pablo Felices-Luna, who’s co-directing with Sara Topham.

The idea for a promenade show, with the cast taking audience members from scene to scene, first came up last December, when Felices-Luna had a bit of lucky foresight. With adult members of the public only just beginning to get access to vaccines, he did some quick estimating, and figured that even by the following year, the MTYP audience — it says it in the name: Young People — might not be getting their doses yet.

Vacant downtown Bay building is still awaiting plans for its future

In the midst of the second wave of the pandemic last fall came an announcement from the Hudson’s Bay Company that many had long anticipated: the downtown Bay store on Portage Avenue would be shut down, closed to the public after 95 years.

The initial announcement by the company forecast a closure in February 2021, but the restrictions on retail implemented by the province to curb skyrocketing COVID-19 case counts apparently hastened the final blow: on Nov. 30, a few months ahead of schedule, the iconic store’s doors were closed for good.

It has now been a full year since that day, which triggered in many Winnipeggers a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era mixed with concern over what the future held: how long would the building sit unused? Would future plans maintain the classic centrepiece of the city’s downtown? Would there be a scenario — akin to the demolition of the Eaton’s store a few blocks away to make room for a new hockey arena’s construction in the early 2000s — where the building disappeared entirely? (Heritage protections quash that fear at 450 Portage Ave.).

These questions aren’t new: they’ve been asked since long before the store closed, with two provincial entities (Manitoba Hydro and Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries) and the University of Winnipeg considering at different points the acquisition of the building for some sort of institutional use.

Lifts at city’s tallest office tower undergoing complete makeover

The 30-year-old elevators at 201 Portage Ave. are undergoing a complete modernization, as downtown workers trickle back into Winnipeg’s tallest office building.

Twelve elevators in the 420-foot tall, 33-storey building are getting a total upgrade. Every moving part on the elevators, every bit of wiring, all of the finishes, and the entire control system are being replaced or refurbished, a painstaking process that began at the Harvard Developments property last spring and won’t be complete until 2022.

“It’s a 100 per cent changeover,” said Trevor Rebeck, the district manager of TK Elevator, formerly ThyssenKrupp Elevator. And in the company’s estimation, it represents the largest elevator modernization in the city’s history.

The elevators were first installed in 1990, and in Rebeck’s and modernization supervisor Vince Levenec’s estimation, they probably had a few years of mileage left. But the end of their lives was near: as they say, what goes up, must eventually come down.

Debbie Patterson rolls out her own perspective on Anne Hathaway in Vern Thiessen’s one-woman play

When William Shakespeare died, in the spring of 1616, he left behind a body of work — plays like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear, to name a few — unparalleled in the English language before or since.

He also left behind his wife, Anne Hathaway, and their two children. And to them, he left his last will and testament. As always with such bequeathals, a question arose: who would be left out, and why?

The bard’s final composition forms the basis of Shakespeare’s Will, by Winnipeg’s Vern Thiessen, a one-woman show that focuses on Hathaway on the day of her husband’s funeral, pondering their relationship and her whole life as she avoids reading the document, and perhaps, the realization that she was a mere chorus member in the dramatis personae of William Shakespeare’s life.

“Everything I was told about Anne Hathaway in school was dismissive of her,” says actress Debbie Patterson, who took on the role in a filmed production of the show produced by Shakespeare in the Ruins, streaming Nov. 19 through Dec. 5. “People said she probably was not very smart, that Shakespeare didn’t love her very much. It didn’t make her sound like a force to be reckoned with.”

Proposed small dwellings could make big difference for homeless veterans

A proposed village of 20 tiny homes for Winnipeg’s homeless veteran population cleared a not-so-tiny hurdle last week, when the city’s property committee passed a motion to sell an acre of city land in Transcona to the Homes for Heroes Foundation.

The land is just north of Transcona Boulevard, west of the Transcona Library. City council and executive policy committee will determine whether the sale is approved later this month. In October, the committee ordered a report on declaring the land surplus to free it for the $400,000 sale, paving the way for Wednesday’s decision.

The national non-profit had been working with the city for about three years to get to this point, says CEO and founder David Howard, who pointed out that at least 200 veterans are living unsheltered in Winnipeg.

A city spokesperson said the public service was first aware of Howard’s foundation’s request to purchase city-owned land in July, when a motion was moved by the Assiniboia Community Committee. After that motion, the property committee directed the public service in September to work with the foundation to find city-owned properties within the city of Winnipeg for their specific program, which led to Wednesday’s passed motion at the property committee.

Developers are optimistic for the year ahead

A new national survey on Canadian real estate conducted by PwC and the Urban Land Institute takes on the task of anticipating what’s to come in 2022, and although there are still areas of concern, stakeholders are optimistic about how the industry will fare in the new year.

So optimistic that some predict not only to return to pre-pandemic business, but to exceed it.

When asked about their expectations for 2022 as compared to 2021, nearly every category of respondent — including builders, investment managers, lenders, service providers, security investors, and commercial real estate developers — felt better about their business prospects. On a scale from 1, representing an abysmal outlook, to 5, representing an excellent one, most assessed their situations at an average of about 3.5, or slightly above fair.

Considering the dreadful predictions that abounded at the start of the pandemic, when there was concern about long-term stability, the report’s authors point out that many companies have come through 2021 better than expected, with a booming housing market, a burgeoning industrial sector strengthened by warehousing and e-commerce fulfilment, and a retail property segment that’s managed to hang on. Even the office sector, considered one of the most volatile, has shown positive signs, the authors note.