The Arts

JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS
Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s (WJT) artistic director, Dan Petrenko, is gearing up for his fifth season at the helm.

Chorus of voices defines WJT’s upcoming season

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Thursday, Jun. 25, 2026

A drama about circumcision, a Tony-winning musical and an abbreviated history of the Jewish people from the pen of a Manitoban performing arts legend are being served up next season by the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, artistic director Dan Petrenko announced Wednesday.

Now in his fifth season at the helm of the WJT, the 28-year-old Petrenko has steered the company out of a pandemic-imposed deficit during his four years of program control, making decisions — a minimal two-show season in 2024, leaning into co-productions and favouring smaller casts — that have enabled the theatre to expand its reach.

The announcement of the company’s 39th season lineup comes just over two months before the WJT partners with Rainbow Stage to bring Fiddler on the Roof to Kildonan Park in September.

Since the Israeli-born, Toronto-raised artist took over for former artistic director Ari Weinberg — now the casting director for the Stratford Festival — in 2022, Petrenko has been tasked with revitalizing the company by incorporating younger theatre-going audiences while remaining faithful to the stock of productions that keep the WJT’s established subscriber base engaged.

Advertise With Us

Weather

Jun. 29, 12 PM: 22°c Cloudy with wind Jun. 29, 6 PM: 21°c Light rain

Winnipeg MB

20°C, Cloudy

Full Forecast

The Arts

RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS Files
Winnipeg-raised, British-based artist Joel Nichol won the National Portrait Gallery’s Young Artist Award on Tuesday.

Winnipeg-raised artist having pinch-me moment in U.K.

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Preview

Winnipeg-raised artist having pinch-me moment in U.K.

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Thursday, Jun. 25, 2026

As an artist, Joel Nichols has spent a lot of time in London’s National Portrait Gallery, looking for inspiration.

And now, one of his portraits will be on view there until the fall.

The Birmingham-born, Winnipeg-raised interdisciplinary artist was one of four people to be named a finalist for the 2026 Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award, a prestigious contemporary portraiture competition held annually by the gallery.

This year’s short list was selected from more than 1,474 entries from artists across 63 countries. Nichols was chosen for his 2025 oil-on-canvas portrait, In Our Borderlands, which is also among 51 portraits that have been chosen for an associated exhibition opening Friday.

Read

Thursday, Jun. 25, 2026

Movies

Supplied
Robert Bresson’s donkey-led film Au Hasard Balthazar plays at Dave Barber Cinematheque Friday.

The beauty of the bleak

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

The beauty of the bleak

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Wednesday, Jun. 24, 2026

Summer has officially begun, and the Dave Barber Cinematheque is ringing in the season with a seven-day festival full of despairing, shocking and unpleasant cinema.

Lead film programmer Olivia Norquay could hardly wait for Bleak Week.

Started in Los Angeles by the American Cinematheque in 2022, this year, the festival is expanding to 73 cities and nearly 100 theatres across the U.S., Canada, England, Scotland, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. Each venue then plots its own program of “uncompromising” films that “wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.”

Norquay — who selected 17 films from directors such as Béla Tarr (The Turin Horse), Agnès Varda (Vagabond), Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and Barbara Loden (Wanda) — says that even though this is the first year of participation for Winnipeg’s only downtown movie theatre, programming bleakness is nothing new at the Dave Barber Cinematheque.

Read

Wednesday, Jun. 24, 2026

The Arts

BROOK JONES / FREE PRESS
Rodrigo Beilfuss’s Poet conveys the violence of the Trojan War in An Iliad.

Epic performance

Holly Harris 5 minute read Preview

Epic performance

Holly Harris 5 minute read Friday, Jun. 19, 2026

War is hell. But it’s also, as playwrights Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare pointedly remind us in their stage adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad (translated by Robert Fagles), all too sadly predictable; bloodlust has run in the veins of humankind from time immemorial.

Shakespeare in the Ruins opened its 10-show run of An Iliad Thursday in the burned-out shell of the Ruins at Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park, with the two-hour (including intermission) briskly paced production directed by Christopher Brauer. The show runs repertory style with this year’s mainstage offering, Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, through July 5.

For their contemporary spin on Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic poem (composed of 24 books), Peterson and O’Hare distil its key battles and characters to a whirlwind tour of duty that skips between antiquity and modern times. They also wisely tell their tale not in its original dactylic hexameter, but in modern vernacular laced with F-bombs, making the narrative more palatable to 21st-century sensibilities.

Kudos to SiR artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss, head shorn and costumed in Rachel Baziuk’s ragtag overcoat and trousers, for undertaking the impressive, Herculean task of delivering an all-guns-blazing monologue as the Poet with nary a stumble.

Read

Friday, Jun. 19, 2026

Music

L. ROWAN / SUPPLIED
Gordon Gerrard conducts during the Manitoba Opera’s production of The Marriage of Figaro this past spring. Gerrard begins his term as the opera’s artistic director in September.

New artistic director brings spirit of adventure to opera job

Eva Wasney 4 minute read Preview

New artistic director brings spirit of adventure to opera job

Eva Wasney 4 minute read Thursday, Jun. 18, 2026

Manitoba Opera’s new artistic director is bringing his baton home.

The company announced the appointment of Gordon Gerrard, a Manitoba-born pianist and conductor, on Thursday following a year-long search. He will begin a five-year term in September, taking over from outgoing general director and CEO Larry Desrochers.

It’s a full-circle moment for Gerrard, 48, who grew up on a grain and cattle farm north of Brandon and saw his first opera, a Manitoba Opera production of Hansel and Gretel, at the Centennial Concert Hall as a University of Manitoba music student.

“Little did I know that a couple of decades later, I’d be leading the artistic side of the company,” Gerrard says over the phone, adding he’s excited to live closer to family and rediscover Winnipeg after years living elsewhere.

Read

Thursday, Jun. 18, 2026

The Arts

BROOK JONES / FREE PRESS
Rodrigo Beilfuss as Homer in An Iliad

SiR’s production of An Iliad explores war, in Troy and beyond

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

SiR’s production of An Iliad explores war, in Troy and beyond

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Thursday, Jun. 18, 2026

The Trappist Monastery Ruins are enlisted as the stand-in for a bedraggled Trojan battleground in An Iliad, the second production of Shakespeare in the Ruins’ 2026 season.

Director Christopher Brauer calls the St. Norbert heritage site — dusty, rugged and incomplete, a reflection of a majestic past fallen into disrepair — the perfect setting for the production’s lone survivor, a road-weary poet played by SiR artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss, to grapple with tours of duty he might prefer to forget.

“He is not just a person who experienced the war in Troy, but he seems to somehow have been put on earth to travel from battle to battle and from war to war,” says Brauer, who directed Beilfuss in the 2022 Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of The Three Musketeers.

The director calls that literary adaptation of a sweeping, romantic epic a romp, where the “heroes are heroes and the villains are villainous.”

Read

Thursday, Jun. 18, 2026

The Arts

Supplied
Maddie Wiener has learned to love taking the audience to uncomfortable places.

SNL writer isn’t afraid to make audiences laugh … and squirm

Aileen Goos 4 minute read Preview

SNL writer isn’t afraid to make audiences laugh … and squirm

Aileen Goos 4 minute read Thursday, Jun. 18, 2026

Calling from a North Carolina airport in a voice just above a whisper, Maddie Wiener sounds more like a thoughtful friend than a comedian whose act includes jokes about sex, depression, body image and questionable behaviour.

Beneath the soft-spoken delivery is a comedian who delights in making audiences squirm.

Whether onstage, in the writers’ room at Saturday Night Live or behind the microphone as co-host of the We’re Having Gay Sex podcast, Wiener has built a following by taking audiences to uncomfortable places and finding the laughs in what most people would rather leave unsaid.

“I do love a laugh that’s also a groan. Like, ‘Oh, I didn’t want to laugh at that, but that got me.’ That’s kind of my favourite button to push,” says Wiener, who makes her Rumor’s Comedy Club debut from today to Saturday.

Read

Thursday, Jun. 18, 2026

Learn more about Advertising solutions

The Arts

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
From left: Ethan Hall, Jerzy Fleury and Killian Halldorson are animators in the Sisler High School Create program.

Sisler program creating new generation of animators

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Preview

Sisler program creating new generation of animators

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Thursday, Jun. 11, 2026

The characters start as crude shapes and stand-ins, then take on form. Your Elsa, Miles Morales or Buzz Lightyear are born, but move only in key poses, like a picture book.

This is the layout and blocking stage of 3D and 2D digital animation’s pipeline, after storyboarding. Then comes the often most laborious phase: animation proper.

It starts with the “roughs,” where motion starts to connect poses. Now you can see Buzz and Woody take off on that rocket or that line of webbing spring from Miles Morales’s hand, but it looks a little like a flipbook.

From here animators work meticulously to create “spline passes” for fluidity. Little details still jut out — such as awkward movement arcs and timings — so more passes are made until only the smallest imperfections remain. Time for clean-up.

Read

Thursday, Jun. 11, 2026

The Arts

Yiddish fest highlights comfort of knish crafting

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Yiddish fest highlights comfort of knish crafting

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Wednesday, Jun. 10, 2026

For Sara Kasdan, the author of the mid-century ethnic best-seller Love and Knishes, the titular dough pocket was a pathway to everlasting romance via the stomach, assured to get the cook’s name into a man’s heart “faster … and stay longer.”

For Harriet Zaidman, the knish’s starting point — an opaque knob of dough to be stretched translucent-thin — is a doorway to a different kind of love, and a reminder of her family’s lasting immigrant roots.

“I’ve had all my life this vision of my baba taking that small knob and stretching it thinly across the table, draping down over the side. You could see the table through it,” says Zaidman, a Garden City-based author who has posted more than 450 recipes to her blog, North End Nosh, since 2017.

When she gets the dough and its fillings — usually potato or kasha (buckwheat) — ready, Zaidman can just about hear her baba Goldie knocking on her family’s Smithfield Avenue door with a weekly delivery of haimishe cooking.

Read

Wednesday, Jun. 10, 2026

The Arts

Charles Sykes/Invision
Joshua Henry accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a leading role in a musical for Ragtime during the 79th Tony Awards on Sunday.

Winnipegger earns Tony for leading role in Broadway production of Ragtime

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Winnipegger earns Tony for leading role in Broadway production of Ragtime

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Tuesday, Jun. 9, 2026

Winnipeg’s Joshua Henry was on top of the musical theatre world Sunday at Radio City Music Hall, winning the Tony Award for best performance by an actor in a leading role for his performance in the Broadway revival of Ragtime.

Henry, whose family moved from Manitoba to Florida when he was a toddler, had previously been nominated for three of the top theatrical honours, given out annually in New York City since 1947.

“It is an honour to play this role — Coalhouse Walker, Jr. — a Black musician whose art led him to his love, and to his dream,” Henry said during his acceptance speech.

“And even in the face of pain and tragedy, he found a way to be heard. Every artist in this room, every artist at home, fight-fight-fight to be heard.”

Read

Tuesday, Jun. 9, 2026

The Arts

PHOTO: SERHII GUMENYUK
DEE BARSY. MY FOUR GRANDMOTHERS, 2017.
ACRYLIC ON GESSOED BIRCH PANEL. COLLECTION OF THE WINNIPEG ART GALLERY;
ACQUIRED WITH FUNDS FROM THE WINNIPEG RH FOUNDATION INC., 2017-531.
ARTWORK SPONSORED BY VIC AND MARLENE JANZEN.

Pride of place

2 minute read Preview

Pride of place

2 minute read Saturday, Jun. 6, 2026

Staycation: The Art of Being Here features more than 100 Manitoba- related artworks from the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq collection, spanning the past 50 years. These pieces reveal how the places around us are layered with memory, story and lived experience.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll spotlight works from this eclectic exhibition, each one offering a new way of seeing home. Experience it in person and enjoy some staycation time at the gallery, on view until December.

Dee Barsy. My Four Grandmothers, 2017. Acrylic on gessoed birch panel. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Acquired with funds from the Winnipeg Rh Foundation Inc., 2017-531. Photo: Serhii Gumenyuk. Artwork sponsored by Vic and Marlene Janzen.

My Four Grandmothers was commissioned for the 2017 WAG exhibition, INSURGENCE/RESURGENCE. Dee Barsy (Ojibwe) is a visual artist and a member of Skownan First Nation, Manitoba (Treaty 2). This vibrant painting depicts Barsy’s interconnected relationships between her four grandmothers, her adopted and biological kinships. Barsy uses contrasting and saturated colours to symbolize the diverse spirit of each of her grandmothers, shown in the four separated but intermingled entities. Within the reflection of these relationships, she reflects on ideas of grief, loss, death and reunification.

Read

Saturday, Jun. 6, 2026

Books

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
Kevin Klassen (right) as Sylvius and Artie Lorraine as Bodyguard No. 1. in As You Like It

Shakespeare takes a spa day

Ben Waldman 6 minute read Preview

Shakespeare takes a spa day

Ben Waldman 6 minute read Thursday, Jun. 4, 2026

Is White Lotus showrunner Mike White a modern-day bard? The Folger Shakespeare Library has at least entertained the question.

After the first season of the Emmy-winning dark comedy aired in 2022, the Washington, D.C.-based institution published a guest post by Austin Tichenor which favourably compared the tropical HBO program — each season set in a different luxury resort — to The Tempest.

“There’s something wonderfully contained about The White Lotus. Unlike other epic and sprawling miniseries, this six-episode character study feels surprisingly intimate, like the five acts of a Shakespeare play,” wrote Tichenor, the co-artistic director of California’s Reduced Shakespeare Company. “And while there’s no actual storm, the sounds of wind, waves, and surf punctuate the proceedings, adding tension and underscoring the turbulence characters are going through.”

In Manitoba, Michelle Boulet couldn’t help but consider one of her favourite Shakespearean comedies as she watched the show’s company of actors — Jennifer Coolidge, Walton Goggins and Parker Posey among them — skewer the uber-rich and ultra-privileged.

Read

Thursday, Jun. 4, 2026

The Arts

What’s up

7 minute read Preview

What’s up

7 minute read Thursday, Jun. 4, 2026

Dr. Brian Goldman book launch

McNally Robinson Booksellers, 1120 Grant Ave.

Tuesday, 7 p.m.

Free admission

Read

Thursday, Jun. 4, 2026

Books

Supplied
Plug In ICA executive director Nadja Pelkey couldn’t be happier to make her way to Winnipeg.

Gallery’s new executive director happy to be leading ‘amazing institution’

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Gallery’s new executive director happy to be leading ‘amazing institution’

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Thursday, Jun. 4, 2026

It’s been a busy week for Nadja Pelkey, the newest executive director of the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art.

After landing in Winnipeg on Saturday, marking her arrival with an at-home banquet of Mexican cuisine and champagne, Pelkey was immediately thrust into the centre of civic conversation Tuesday, attending the Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts on her second day on the job.

“It’s funny. I was talking to a couple friends of friends of mine at other organizations, and typically, when you come into a new organization, a new institution, there’s a sort of lull in which you can gain your footing and learn before getting very involved,” says Pelkey, who last worked as a programmer and curator with Art Windsor-Essex in Ontario.

Not only was Pelkey in mingle-mode within hours of starting on the Plug In payroll, but the organization’s 11th executive director’s first week also coincided with a “blockbuster” exhibition, Sarah Anne Johnson’s House on Fire, opening tonight at 460 Portage Ave.

Read

Thursday, Jun. 4, 2026

The Arts

Ruth Bonneville / Free Press
Ceramicist Grace Nickel accepts the Making a Mark award, recognizing mid-career artists.

Business, arts communities come together to honour artists

Conrad Sweatman 4 minute read Preview

Business, arts communities come together to honour artists

Conrad Sweatman 4 minute read Wednesday, Jun. 3, 2026

Artists and arts administrators weren’t the only ones who filled the RBC Convention Centre Tuesday for the Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts, hosted by the Winnipeg Arts Council.

Among the sea of beaded necklaces, horn-rimmed glasses and other artsy attire were crisp suits worn by Winnipeg’s leading business and political figures, including Mayor Scott Gillingham himself.

“Truly, municipal politics and arts are the chocolate and peanut butter of our cultural milieu,” said event host and comedian Jane Testar. “This is where the action happens, this is where the deals are made, where the wheels of power turn, where the big-wigs mingle with art-house legends.”

The event opened with a dance — this time by Métis trio the Ivan Flett Memorial Dancers — and like last year, Gillingham was coaxed into participating in the onstage spectacle. He hopped on one foot during the trio’s jig demonstration, before imploring the audience to rise to their feet and share in the moment.

Read

Wednesday, Jun. 3, 2026

Music

Winnipeg artist nominated for theatre prize for second straight year

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

Winnipeg artist nominated for theatre prize for second straight year

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Wednesday, Jun. 3, 2026

For the second consecutive year, Winnipeg’s Dasha Plett is nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award for outstanding sound design.

The 2026 field of nominees, announced Monday by the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts, was drawn from eligible theatre, dance and opera productions in the Ontario city.

Last year, Plett — a co-founder with Gislina Patterson of local performance collective We Quit Theatre — was nominated for her work on Roberto Zucco, a production by the pre-eminent downtown Toronto queer theatre Buddies in Bad Times.

This time around, the theatre artist is nominated for her work on Take Rimbaud by playwright-performer Susanna Fournier, a “performance poem imagining the worlds of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Sylvia Plath, Sappho and post-art school malaise,” per Buddies in Bad Times.

Read

Wednesday, Jun. 3, 2026

June 29, 2026

Notification Settings

Staging Breaking News

Staging Recommended Reads