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Neilfest

Times Change(d), 234 Main St.

Friday, 9:30 p.m.; Saturday, 3 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Tickets: $23 at eventbrite.ca

Newfoundland artist’s fictional hockey league takes on toxic masculinity, homophobia in the sport

The St. John’s Sissies. The Nain Nancys. The Come By Chance Flamers.

These are just some of the teams in the Queer Newfoundland Hockey League, the fictional conference at the heart of a multimedia solo exhibition of the same name by Canadian artist Lucas Morneau, which comes to Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg today.

Morneau crocheted and rug-hooked the brightly coloured, vintage-inspired jerseys — complete with logos — for all 14 of the QNHL’s teams, which are all named for pejoratives used against LGBTTQ+ communities in an act of reclamation.

It’s a strictly Newfoundland and Labrador league because Morneau, who uses they/them pronouns, grew up in Corner Brook (repped here by the Corner Brook Queens). But also, Newfoundland just has a lot of funny town names (see: Dildo, whose team in the QNHL is the Dykes, or Leading Tickles, whose team is the Lesbos).

Local dance pioneers leap, pirouette into hall of fame

CBC sitcom The Newsroom, created by Winnipeg-born Ken Finklemen, is unjustly forgotten, despite being years ahead of its time in terms of its shaky handheld-camera style and its biting parody of Toronto-centric CBC culture.

“But Winnipeg’s supposed to have a great symphony,” one character reassures a despondent colleague who has been reassigned to anchor in the Manitoba capital.

“Hear Winnipeg’s got a great ballet. You’ll have a good time, I swear,” says another.

Empty encouragement this may be, but Finklemen’s characters were spitting facts: Winnipeg’s orchestras and dance companies have among Canada’s most significant lineages.

Thin Air director closes book on job

for food cost estimator see https://staging.winnipegfreepress.com/uncategorized/2025/12/04/2026-food-cost-estimator

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

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

Listening and learning

It’s a full season of songs and speakers for Music ’N’ Mavens.

The annual series of concerts and lectures features 19 programs from Jan. 6 to March 26, including the debut of After Dark, a four-concert evening series.

Karla Berbrayer, Music ’N’ Mavens’ founding producer, says the evening concert series responds to popular demand, which has steadily climbed after a few rocky post-pandemic seasons.

“It’s just been quite remarkable. I mean, the biggest complaint we get is, ‘I can’t get tickets,’” she says.

The Empire Strikes Back… on Jubilee Avenue

A few days ago, in a neighbourhood not far away…

A three-metre-tall, 3.5-metre-long All Terrain Armored Transport walker from Star Wars showed up outside a home on Jubilee Avenue in the Lord Roberts area last Sunday to spread some nerdy holiday cheer.

The science-fiction combat vehicle, dressed in multicolour Christmas lights, was built by Aaron Frost and his students in the University of Winnipeg theatre department’s advanced stagecraft class as a lesson in three-dimensional set pieces.

“We used to make little fireplaces as their final project, and I just thought, you know, let’s do something way more fun,” Frost said Wednesday.

Beautiful, sometimes brainy bunch of Munsch

Munsch Upon a Time, in a theatre not that far away, Prairie Theatre Exchange reinstated its 30-year tradition of bringing beloved Canadian children’s author Robert Munsch’s storybooks to life for the first time since 2019.

Its latest family-friendly holiday show, Munsch Upon a Time, opened over the weekend at the Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage and was met with giggles and glee by tots and their caregivers Sunday morning.

The award-winning writer scarcely needs introduction. Born in Pittsburgh, Penn., in 1945, Munsch moved to Canada in 1975 to teach at the University of Guelph, before devoting himself exclusively to children’s literature. Kids have eagerly lapped up his engaging, wholly relatable books including Love You Forever, A Promise Is a Promise and Alligator Baby.

The 60-minute production with all-local thespians, slickly directed by Alissa Watson, features a medley of five tales stitched together into a cosy narrative quilt by Winnipeg-based playwright/actor/director Debbie Patterson. The theatre artist, whose prior adaptations of Munsch’s perennially popular stories have been produced in theatres across Canada, creates effective transitions that become a framing device for each story, as well as providing overall context.

Local theatre productions offer family-friendly entertainment during holiday break

‘When I ask Filipinos if they know the story Ibong Adarna, I often jog their memories by saying, ‘It’s the one where a bird poops on people and turns them to stone,” says Winnipeg writer Primrose Madayag Knazan.

But in Knazan’s one-hour theatrical retelling, the classic folk tale about a dazzling creature with the power to heal or petrify those who approach it transforms into a shimmering, ethereal being (Matthew Pagtalunan, an award-winning drag artist who performs as Nila Ganda), who instead of calcifying agents emits glitter: call it a glow-up with a less icky glow-down.

So yes, The Glitter Bird — this year’s entry into local company UNI Together’s Pamasko Tales holiday musical series — will feature its fair share of loving parody. But dramaturg Hazel Venzon says the story it pays homage to is also teeming with timeless Filipino ideals and wisdom, such as the principle of kababaang-loob, or inner humility, while also reflecting on challenging colonial histories.

“The endurance of the Ibong Adarna in Filipino education and common imagination speaks to its adaptability, as well,” says Venzon. “It survives not because it is static, but because it continually invites reinterpretation — whether as a children’s tale, a nationalist allegory, or a critique of authority.”

Some soundtracks have become synonymous with the season

Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score isn’t the only one that has become popular outside of its original context.

Many TV and film soundtracks and scores have taken their rightful place in the Christmas-music canon, alongside the traditional carols, the modern pop hits and the new covers of traditional carols.

Here are five that have become synonymous with the season.

Johnny Marks, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

A fairy tale that takes down fascism? Don’t mind if we boo!

A fascistic cabal living it up in the cushy clouds of Skyworld hopes to drain the depleted Lowlands of its remaining natural resources, forcing young Jax (Cyan Gargol) to climb the beanstalk and resist in Sick + Twisted Theatre’s third annual “Crip-Mas” panto.

In the panto tradition, audiences are invited to boo the villains — Artie Lorraine’s President/Emperor-Elect (P.E.E.), Joanna Hawkins’ Masterminder and Carlyn Graff-Czehryn’s Henchman — and rally for the heroes, including the non-binary, neurodivergent Jax, their mother (Theresa Thomson) and the family’s noble, baritone-voiced steed (Christopher Dunn).

For Sick + Twisted, an inclusive theatre company founded by Debbie Patterson, the panto format has become an opportunity to showcase the talents of artists who experience a wide range of both visible and invisible disabilities while also offering riotous humour, bombastic song and dance — Joseph Aragon is musical director and accompanies on grand piano — and scathing critiques of ableist power structures.

Combining classic fairy and folk tales with contemporary commentary, the panto is catalyzed by its underdog spirit, relying on the audience to be as politically engaged as the onstage happenings.

Christmas flicks target of PTE holiday improv

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

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

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

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

Mythical musical resonates with portrayer of Percy

Brady Barrientos reads young.

“I’m 23, but I feel like I look like I’m 12,” the actor says.

And for his latest role, the largest of his burgeoning musical theatre career, the performer went back to his elementary school bookshelf.

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

Student production grapples with fascism

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

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

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

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

Musical sleighs!

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

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

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

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