L’impro’ manitobaine rencontre le monde

Du 18 au 21 mars, André Vrignon-Tessier, propriétaire des monuments Brunet et figure connue de la Ligue d’Improvisation du Manitoba (LIM), se rendra dans la ville de Québec pour y représenter le Manitoba.

À l’occasion de la journée internationale de la francophonie, ce 20 mars, le club d’improvisation de Québec, en partenariat avec le ministère des Relations internationales du Québec, organise la fête internationale de la francophonie.

Parmi les célébrations, une soirée d’improvisation à laquelle participeront plusieurs acteurs en provenance de plusieurs horizons francophones.

Ces derniers feront le déplacement depuis l’Acadie, la France, la Belgique, Haïti et finalement le Manitoba.

Une 5e édition, et une incorporation pour Noir et Fier

Lors du gala de clôture de Noir et Fier, tenu le 26 février au Musée canadien pour les droits de la personne (MCDP), le festival conclut le mois de février avec l’annonce d’une incorporation. L’organisation franchit donc une étape structurante importante en devenant un organisme à but non lucratif à part entière.

“Le bilan que je fais de cette cinquième édition est très positif.”

En cinq ans, Noir et Fier est passé d’une exposition de portraits pour le mois de l’histoire des Noirs, à un festival qui occupe désormais tout au long de février et qui franchit aujourd’hui une nouvelle étape avec son incorporation.

“Chacune des activités a rassemblé beaucoup de personnes. Ça a été des moments de discussion très intenses, de très bons moments d’échange, de partage, de sensibilisation et d’éducation. Nos statistiques sont assez frappantes,” assure Wilgis Agossa, directeur artistique et fondateur de Noir et Fier.

Teen newcomers hope powerful poem opens minds

Escaping Syria as a child, Fawwaz (Ali) Al Hassan knows a thing or two about global conflict.

“I’ve gone through war, genocide, poverty, myself firsthand, and I know how bad and terrible it is for anyone, not just for people of my kind, but anyone across the world,” the 17 year old who immigrated to Canada 10 years ago said.

The Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute student co-wrote the spoken-word poem What We’re Meant to Be, along with Sami Suliman, 16, and Tobilola (Tobi) Olorunsola, 17. The trio recited it Monday at the Manitoba legislature as part of the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation’s international development week.

The teens, all newcomers to Canada, brought their own personal experiences to the poem, a journey across the globe.

Tad et Birdy: quand le jeu devient un langage commun

La nouvelle production jeunesse du Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP), Tad and Birdy, mise sur la créativité pour aborder la peur, la curiosité et le courage. Présentée au 7 février à Winnipeg, la pièce partira ensuite en tournée dans plusieurs communautés manitobaines.

Dans les coulisses, Sarah Lamoureux, responsable de la régie, décrit un processus de création fondé sur la collaboration et l’expérimentation. Travailler avec une petite équipe lui permet de dépasser le rôle traditionnel de coordination pour participer activement à la mise en scène.

“Je peux suggérer des choses à essayer, et on a la chance de vraiment les explorer ensemble. Les comédiens nes aussi proposent leurs idées, parce que ce sont eux et elles qui sont sur scène.”

Cette liberté créative se reflète dans les choix scéniques. Lorsque le texte ne précise pas les accessoires, l’équipe invente. Des crayons géants, des cartes Pokémon et des objets du quotidien deviennent les moteurs d’un imaginaire partagé.

Mythical quest takes audiences on wild ride in The Lightning Thief

Manitoba Theatre for Young People plunges a full house of mortals into the shadowy underworld as it presents the Greek myth-infused The Lightning Thief.

The musical holiday production (90 minutes including intermission) is based on American author’s Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson fantasy novel series, featuring a heavenly, all-local cast that would make any god or goddess proud.

After being expelled from school for his “fifth time in six years,” 12-year-old Percy Jackson, a “half-blood” son born of a human mother, Sally Jackson, and Poseidon, god of the sea, embarks on a hero’s quest to rescue a powerful lightning bolt stolen from Zeus.

We follow Percy into Camp Half-Blood, where he learns he’s a demigod, before setting out with his half-blood chums Annabeth and Grover to various locales, including Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with all roads ultimately leading to Hades.

Play serves as prism for different politics, histories

If you can’t make it to opening night for the latest production from Theatre Projects Manitoba, don’t fret: there are five premières for The Only Good Indian, with each solo performance vastly different from the next.

Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s therapy-set two-hander plays with reality

The public and private perils of online engagement crash through the screen and into a therapist’s office in Job, a nervy drama that explores the power of posts and the ethical responsibilities inherent to our respective postings.

Written by New York’s Max Wolf Friedlich and directed by Calgary’s Jack Grinhaus, the opening production of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s season heads to the races with the brandishing of a starter’s gun in the warped offices of Bay Area psychotherapist Lloyd (Dov Mickelson).

Lloyd’s description of his typical patient — young people who are “hopeless and beyond help” — isn’t exactly inspirational.

Blundstone-booted Jane (Jada Rifkin) seems to have made the cut, having been placed on paid administrative leave after a viral meltdown by her employer, an unnamed tech giant on whose campus she’s enrolled as an adjudicator.

Ryan Reynolds suggests swapping phones with a MAGA supporter, checking out their algorithm

TORONTO - Ryan Reynolds says mounting tensions between Canada and the U.S. haven't changed anything for him as a Canuck in Hollywood.

The "Deadpool" star preached unity during an onstage conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival, when chief programming officer Anita Lee asked him what it was like being a Canadian in Los Angeles during this "elbows up" era of increased nationalism.

In a nearly five-minute answer to the question, Reynolds said he's always held Canadian values, including conflict resolution, and he seeks "to learn, rather than win."

Reynolds is at TIFF to promote the new documentary "John Candy: I Like Me," which he produced.

Impro: Une finale époustouflante

La finale de la Ligue d’improvisation du secondaire tellement époustouflante (LISTE) de la Division scolaire franco-manitobaine s’est déroulée dans une ambiance festive le 18 mars dernier. Une soirée qui a vu l’équipe La verdure violente du Collège Louis-Riel l’emporter au bout de deux heures de match.

Comme à l’accoutumée, la compétition s’est tenue dans la bonne humeur au Centre culturel franco-manitobain (CCFM), dans la salle Pauline-Boutal.

Les gradins étaient remplis de parents, frères, sœurs et amis venus soutenir leurs participants favoris.

L’équipe Citrus improbus (maillot rouge) du Centre scolaire Léo-Rémillard entraînée par Roger Durand a affronté l’équipe La verdure violente (maillot vert) du Collège Louis-Riel, entraînée par Carine Roy. À l’issue de la soirée, l’équipe Piste de chameau, de l’école Pointe-des-Chênes, s’est aussi vu remettre le prix spécial époustouflant qui récompense leur esprit sportif.

Louis-José Houde fait un retour attendu à Winnipeg

Il en avait fait la promesse en 2019. Six ans plus tard, et une pandémie passés par là, l’humoriste sera de nouveau sur la scène de la salle Pauline-Boutal le 26 janvier au CCFM.

Normalement, ce retour dans la capitale manitobaine aurait dû se faire plus tôt que ça.

“En 2019, le spectacle avait été tellement agréable que vers la fin, encore sur la scène, j’avais déclaré que je reviendrais. Mon producteur l’apprenait au même moment. [rires] Donc, on avait pris rendez-vous pour avril ou mai 2020, et ce n’était pas arrivé …”

L’humoriste québécois se souvient notamment dans l’ambiance et de l’atmosphère qui régnait dans la salle Pauline-Boutal. “J’avais beaucoup aimé cette salle-là de par sa configuration. On n’a pas de salle comme ça à Montréal, il n’y a pas vraiment de scène dans mon souvenir. On est comme sur un plancher, avec le public en demi-lune. Pour l’humour, c’est extrêmement efficace, on entendait vraiment bien les rires. Je me sentais très proche des gens.”

Une relève pour le monde théâtrale francophone

Sur les planches du Théâtre Cercle Molière, six jeunes de 16 à 22 ans d’expression française vont pouvoir donner libre cours à leur imagination grâce à la pièce Un peu partout. Une pièce dont le message peut faire écho chez tout le monde.

À 18 ans, Isabelle est à la croisée des chemins, partir pour se découvrir ou bien rester. Ce sont ses réflexions que le public pourra suivre dès le 15 janvier.

Et qui de mieux que des personnes qui passent eux-mêmes par ce genre de réflexion pour écrire ce texte? Ce sont donc Mikaël Beaudry, Andreas Detillieux, Madison Nelson, Lizzie Rochon, Jordan Showers, Amélie Tétrault, accompagnés de leur guide Philippe Habeck, qui ont co-écrit et mis en scène cette pièce.

Il aura fallu 18 mois pour passer de la réflexion à la représentation, un beau travail pour Philippe Habeck, enseignant à la retraite. “Pour moi, faire du théâtre c’est la meilleure façon de parler avec le cœur. Le Festival théâtre jeunesse a toujours été ma plus grande passion.

Miss Shakespeare turns gender bias on its ear

Winnipeg Studio Theatre kicked off its season with the guts and glory of female empowerment in its all-women-led local premiere of Miss Shakespeare.

The two-hour musical — directed by company artistic director Erin McGrath and presented by Rainbow Stage — runs through Oct. 5 at the University of Winnipeg’s Asper Centre for Theatre and Film. Saturday night’s crowd eagerly lapped up its feminist ethos.

Its quasi-historical protagonist, Judith Shakespeare (played by a spunky Rhea Rodych-Rasidescu), is the Bard’s real-life daughter “born with a poetic soul.” Judith lives in the shadows of her famous father during the repressive 1600s, when women were relegated to becoming wives and mothers, rather than pursuing their own passions.

Judith yearns for her own identity as a self-actualized creative powerhouse, and cobbles together the “Gossips,” a merry band of like-minded women who surreptitiously meet each week in the bowels of The Cage tavern to create a play. They spar, share stories, and dream, risking public humiliation if they’re discovered treading the boards like their male counterparts.

Satirical musical tackles health-care woes in bite-sized chunks

They say laughter is the best medicine. Throw a little song-and-dance into the mix and you get Larry Saves the Canadian Healthcare System — an 11-part web microseries that humorously addresses Canada’s ailing medical system through music and satire.

Sara Kreindler, a professor of community health sciences at the University of Manitoba, spearheads the show, drawing from her extensive research.

“It’s about starting a conversation,” says writer-composer Kreindler, who has a PhD in social psychology. “Whether you’re a health-care provider or just someone curious about the system, I want viewers to come away feeling empowered to hold our elected leaders accountable for addressing the underlying issues.”

Through the character of Larry, played by Winnipeg actor Toby Hughes, viewers embark on a journey navigating the complexities of health-care policy.

The show must go on as Selkirk buys theatre

Many in Selkirk thought the credits had rolled for the Garry Theatre, but it appears there’s a sequel.

Landmark Cinemas decided to close it in May and on Wednesday, the City of Selkirk announced it had purchased the theatre for $350,000, plus closing costs.

“What we’ve heard so far is people are very excited and very happy that the city has been able to secure the property,” said Selkirk CAO Duane Nicol.

Nicol said the city will reach out to the community to determine how best to use the building. The city hopes it will become a centre for arts and culture, he said.

Gripping drama Elle brings outdoor hardship to PTE's indoor stage

The medium of theatre doesn't necessarily lend itself to a story of survival in the wilderness.

There's a reason The Revenant was a movie and not a Broadway play.

And yet the historical drama Elle, an adaptation of the Governor General’s Award-winning novel by Douglas Glover of the same name by Toronto actress Severn Thompson, manages to be an engaging, gripping piece of work... even in the civilized Prairie Theatre Exchange environs in Portage Place.

Over the course of 90 minutes (without intermission), Thompson connects us to an extraordinary character, based on Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, a headstrong young Frenchwoman tantalized to a trip to Canada in 1542 by exotic tales of naked natives and strange customs.

SiR’s upcoming season a case of all’s fair in love and war

A month before Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey invades cinemas worldwide, Shakespeare in the Ruins’ 2026 season will feature a solo version of The Iliad, giving audiences a crash course in Homer’s epic prequel just in time for a blockbuster summer.

With global conflict and the threats of unmitigated re-armament on his — and everyone’s — mind, artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss says it only made sense for the outdoor theatre company to return to the Trojan War as a window into the everlasting human cost of international conflict.

Beilfuss, who joined SiR as artistic director in 2019, made a concerted effort throughout the company’s return from pandemic-induced hiatus to program gentler fare. But with last year’s well-received production of Macbeth, the company indicated it was ready to return to tragic terrain.

During a season backdropped by wildfire, the artistic director was reminded of the potential for the classics to cut through the smoke and reveal eternal truths as the world burns.

Manitoba Opera season features reimagined Scott Joplin work and Puccini classic

Manitoba Opera’s 54th season will feature a once-forgotten masterpiece and a returning classic.

The 2026-27 season opens with the local première of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha: A Musical Reimagining (Nov. 21, 25, 27) and closes with Madama Butterfly (April 17, 21, 23, 2027), both performed at the Centennial Concert Hall.

Treemonisha was published in 1911 by Scott Joplin, the celebrated African-American pianist and composer often referred to as the King of Ragtime. Set during the Reconstruction era in the United States, the three-act opera focuses on the story of its title character, a young freedwoman, and fuses Western classical music with blues, gospel and ragtime.

The work proved too groundbreaking for the Euro-centric opera establishment and was produced for the first time in 1970, more than 50 years after Joplin’s death. The composer was awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for his contributions to American music.

An AI-rendered Val Kilmer will posthumously appear in a new film

NEW YORK (AP) — A year after the actor's death, a generative AI version of Val Kilmer will co-star in an independent film, in one of the boldest uses yet of artificial intelligence in moviemaking.

First Line Films announced Wednesday that Kilmer has posthumously joined the cast of a film titled “As Deep as the Grave.” The producers said that, before his death, Kilmer had signed on to perform in the movie but was unable to because of his health.

Kilmer's estate gave permission for his digital replication, and is being compensated for it. Mercedes Kilmer, the actor's daughter, said the role resonated with her father.

“He always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling,” she said in a statement. “This spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part.”

Ghosts of pasts faced in spirited Royal MTC production

Under the light of a lakeside moon and its brighter-than-the-city constellations, in the glow of a sacred fire, a portal to awakening opens for three men grieving the loss of their childhood friend in this spirit story, an absorbing, eerie and chill-inducing first play from Norway House’s Rhonda Apetagon.

Next Prairie Theatre Exchange season will capitalize on what works

Five Canadian productions are slated for next season at Prairie Theatre Exchange, a downtown institution that’s in the midst of a post-pandemic bounceback under the leadership of artistic director Ann Hodges and managing director Katie Inverarity.

Midway through their first full seasons at the venerable Portage Place company, Hodges and Inverarity have helped oversee a 59 per cent increase in subscriptions with a 27 per cent leap in single-ticket sales compared to 2024.

So when it came time to program PTE’s 54th season and her second at the helm, Hodges — who inherited the artistic mantle in 2024 from Thomas Morgan Jones — figured she wouldn’t try to fix what’s firing on all cylinders.

Announced Friday, the 2026-27 season will kick off with a trip to the rink for Tracey Power’s Glory, based on the story of the Preston Rivulettes, a women’s hockey team that won 95 per cent of its games over a dominant decade between 1931 and 1940. Set to be directed by Mariam Bernstein, the production (Oct. 13-25) will feature several hockey games choreographed by Victoria Exconde to era-specific swing music directed by Joseph Aragon.

First-time playwright’s social work training helps craft horror drama In the Shadow Beyond the Pines

The type of writing that thriller aficionado Rhonda Apetagon does on a day-to-day basis isn’t anyone’s idea of creative fun: as a trained social worker, the first-time playwright is accustomed to filing reports about “the real scary stuff” in life: loss, addiction, violence and the abuse and maltreatment of children.

“That’s way scarier for me than ghosts,” says the director of Kinosao Sipi Minisowin Agency, which provides child and family services to members of Apetagon’s community, Norway House Cree Nation.

Apetagon’s debut play, In the Shadow Beyond the Pines, premièring tonight at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, takes place at the intersection of those two strains of horror stories, sending three grieving men (Daniel Knight, Jeremy Proulx and James Dallas Smith) into the forest to light a sacred fire for their recently departed friend, Warren, who was the quartet’s “glue” since childhood, holding the group together even as the joys, pressures and traumas of adult life pulled them apart.

Apetagon wanted the play, set on the outskirts of an unnamed northern community, to highlight the double-edged nature of living in a remote environment, where the combination of intense togetherness and relative isolation presents both threat and opportunity.

VistaVision, a vintage format left for dead, is revived in ‘One Battle After Another’ and more

NEW YORK (AP) — When Paul Thomas Anderson told his cinematographer Michael Bauman that he wanted to shoot “One Battle After Another” on VistaVision — a large-scale film format born in the 1950s — he had some questions.

“Question one was: Is this even going to be reliable?” Bauman recalls.

For much of the past 60 years, the few remaining VistaVision cameras have been mostly collecting dust on shelves. Though the format was widely used in the 1950s, when Alfred Hitchcock shot “Vertigo” on it and Cecil B. DeMille used it for “The Ten Commandments,” VistaVision went dormant by the early 1960s.

Yet at the March 15 Academy Awards, a movie made largely with decades-old antique cameras is poised to win best picture. Even in 2026, when most films are shot digitally and AI has begun filtering into moviemaking, “One Battle After Another” has — with film equipment borrowed from collectors and museums — showed that a vintage, analog film system can still astonish moviegoers.

Imaginative production delivers excellent encore performances

When Brush Theatre first brought its flagship production, Doodle POP, to Winnipeg in 2022, the South Korean company was an unknown entity locally.

Not anymore: with its third visit to the Manitoba Theatre for Young People in five years underway, the highly imaginative troupe has scribbled its way into the memories of a generation of theatregoers.

While adult audiences might not appreciate a professional theatre company programming similar shows with such frequency, MTYP hasn’t hesitated to extend return invitations to Brush, which blends miming, clowning, drawing and dazzling projections into unique and approachable stage concoctions, driven by participation from a rapt, ever-changing audience.

A kid only gets one chance to see their first theatre performance, and Doodle POP is just about as fun and engaging an introductory experience one can dream up.