Arts & Entertainment – Winnipeg Free Press

What’s up

5 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CST

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

Advertise With Us

Weather

Nov. 15, 12 AM: 4°c Partly cloudy with wind Nov. 15, 6 AM: 1°c Windy

Winnipeg MB

4°C, Windy

Full Forecast

Two-hander playing game of clones

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Two-hander playing game of clones

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CST

Even though the play premièred in 2002, starring Daniel Craig and the late Michael Gambon, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s version of the cloning thriller A Number is an original copy.

That’s by Caryl Churchill’s design. Aside from upholding the interlacing dialogue between a father (Victor Ertmanis) and his son (Rodrigo Beilfuss), the Obie-winning playwright leaves the rest up to interpretation. Though each successive production shares the same script, Churchill’s complete eschewal of stage direction and design notes allows for individuated artistic mutations: no two snowflakes are alike.

“All she tells us is, ‘Here are the characters,’ their ages and that the whole play takes place in the father’s home,” says Beilfuss, who, as the artistic director of Shakespeare in the Ruins, is accustomed to more clearly delineated instructions. “But that’s it — we get to come up with everything else. Could they be drinking in the scene? Does the father use a cane? Could one of the sons be wearing a baseball cap?

“Basically, we’re creating this play, our own version of it, our own world.”

Read

Yesterday at 2:00 AM CST

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
Rodrigo Beilfuss plays Bernard in cloning thriller A Number.

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

Jen Zoratti 6 minute read Preview

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

Jen Zoratti 6 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CST

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).

Read

Yesterday at 2:00 AM CST

Annie France Noël photo.
Morneau’s Queer Newfoundland Hockey League project reclaims homophobic pejoratives and reimagines them as teams to root for.

Local dance pioneers leap, pirouette into hall of fame

Conrad Sweatman 3 minute read Preview

Local dance pioneers leap, pirouette into hall of fame

Conrad Sweatman 3 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

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.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

PHIL HOSSACK / FREE PRESS FILES
Former artistic director of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Arnold Spohr, is being inducted into this year’s Dance Collection Danse hall of fame.

Award-winning doc featured at local festival

Randall King 4 minute read Preview

Award-winning doc featured at local festival

Randall King 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

A 90-year-old Manitoba woman was the hit of the Hot Docs documentary film festival in April in Toronto. You can come to that conclusion honestly since the film — Agatha’s Almanac — won Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the festival.

And now we can see what the fuss was about. The film is playing at Gimme Some Truth, the 16th edition of the Dave Barber Cinematheque’s own documentary festival. It screens today at 3 p.m.

The film wears its distinction proudly, but not too proudly. With its gentle, considered pace and its lovingly composed, Zen-like images of agricultural beauty, it is the antithesis of some of the typically provocative docs out there.

It’s more of a barn-builder than a barn-burner.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Supplied
Agatha’s Almanac features Agatha Bock growing, cooking and canning food, and maintaining her property.

IRA informant cover-up at the core of Herron’s latest Slow Horses thriller

Reviewed by Chris Smith 5 minute read Preview

IRA informant cover-up at the core of Herron’s latest Slow Horses thriller

Reviewed by Chris Smith 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Jackson Lamb and his band of misfits and failed spies are back in the decrepit Slough House in London, where they have been dumped by Britain’s espionage service, MI5, for blotting their copybooks and in the hope they will become so bored they’ll leave the service of their own accord.

Fat chance! The Slow Horses, as they are called, are yet again drawn into nefarious espionage missions, ancient and new, in British author Mick Herron’s ninth Slow Horses novel, a series that spawned the popular Apple TV adaption of the same name.

Clown Town has the rejects discovering a horrendous coverup during The Troubles in Northern Ireland in which the spy service — Regent’s Park, or just the Park — paid an IRA informant codenamed Pitchfork and turned a blind eye as he raped and killed for his own purposes. If it becomes public, the Park will be under political and public scrutiny it does not want and the Service’s first desk, Diana Taverner, will do anything to prevent that happening.

The opening of the book describes Pitchfork’s go-to method of dispatching his enemies — crushing their heads under the wheel of a Land Rover — and if making that public won’t cause a political firestorm, nothing will.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Matt Dunham / Associated Press files
Mick Herron

Feline companion beguiling, insightful

Reviewed by Gordon Arnold 4 minute read Preview

Feline companion beguiling, insightful

Reviewed by Gordon Arnold 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Most of the interaction in German writers J.M. Gutsch and Maxim Leo’s Frankie is between Frankie, a cat, and Richard Gold, who is grieving the death of his wife and is about to hang himself when Frankie turns up injured on his doorstep. They need each other, and become each other’s purpose in life.

As Gold soon discovers, Frankie can talk. Once Gold gets over his shock, they proceed on to many adventures.

Frankie didn’t like any of the names people gave him until old Mrs. Berkowitz adopted him. She was a great fan of Frank Sinatra, so she called the stray Frank. That name met with his approval, and one of the crooner’s well-known songs pretty much describes Frankie’s lifestyle: “I’ve lived a life that’s full/I travelled each and every highway/And more, much more than this/I did it my way.”

When talking with people, Frankie speaks “Humanish,” as opposed to the “Cattish” he uses in dealing with other animals. The advantage of “Cattish” is that it’s a universal language for cats — so, for example, a cat from Germany can talk with a cat from Sweden and no translation is required.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Learn more about Advertising solutions

Smith’s quasi-satirical gen Z characters navigate pitfalls of work, sex and alienation

Reviewed by Jill Wilson 5 minute read Preview

Smith’s quasi-satirical gen Z characters navigate pitfalls of work, sex and alienation

Reviewed by Jill Wilson 5 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Self Care, Toronto writer Russell Smith’s first novel in 15 years, is bound to make some readers bristle.

In it, the 62-year-old author of How Insensitive and Girl Crazy takes a quasi-satirical look at gen Z, portraying it as an aggrieved generation overdiagnosed with and overmedicated for mental illness, having lots of sex but taking little joy in it.

Of course, it’s a writer’s prerogative to put himself in the shoes of characters who are nothing like himself (though Smith has not historically done so), but when choosing to satirize the complicated lives and unique loneliness of a generation so far removed from his own, he opens himself up to accusations of, at best, a kind of “old man shakes fists at clouds” obliviousness or, at worst, the snide condescension of privilege.

These fears are not entirely misplaced. However, Smith often accurately and anthropologically puts his finger directly on the throbbing purple bruise of modern discontent, disaffection and alienation.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Nail salon owner offers keen observations of human behaviour in Thammavongsa’s debut novel

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 6 minute read Preview

Nail salon owner offers keen observations of human behaviour in Thammavongsa’s debut novel

Reviewed by Zilla Jones 6 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Souvankhan Thammavongsa won the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award for her debut short-story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, which was preceded by four collections of poetry. Her debut novel, Pick a Colour, has also landed on the shortlist for the 2025 Giller Prize, which will be awarded Nov. 17.

Pick A Colour is a slim novel that takes place over the course of a single day in a single location — a nail and beauty salon in an unnamed city. It is told from the first-person perspective of a single person, Ning, the salon’s owner. Interestingly, though the back cover blurb suggests that Ning is an immigrant, this is never explicitly stated in the novel or in the author’s introduction. We’re not told where Ning was born or where her family is from; she is proficient in both English and another unnamed language.

Every woman who works in the salon has a nametag identifying them as Susan. The clients don’t notice, and when they call and ask to book an appointment with Susan, she’s always available.

This business decision defines Ning: she is practical and unsentimental, able to turn other peoples’ misconceptions and stereotypes into a benefit. She can also be autocratic: her staff must look the same, and when one employee arrives with her hair two inches longer than everyone else’s, Ning grabs scissors and cuts it.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Steph Martyniuk photo
Souvankham Thammavongsa cleverly breaks a cardinal rule of the novel in her full-length debut — rather than having the main character change, it’s the expectations of readers that are altered.

Smartphones deeply intertwined with our personal lives

Reviewed by Christopher Adams 4 minute read Preview

Smartphones deeply intertwined with our personal lives

Reviewed by Christopher Adams 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Consider for a moment the stress of misplacing your iPhone or Android device. Now compare this to 20 years ago, and how you might feel about misplacing a flip phone.

In Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal professor Stephen Monteiro, who teaches in the department of communications at Concordia University, shows what has changed and why, illustrating how our lives are now intertwined with our personal devices. Losing one of these is much more than losing a flip phone.

Our devices now collect personal data while adjusting to our hour-by-hour activities. Like a suspicious spouse, these devices are needy; they track our activities via GPS, store our experiences through video and photos and even monitor our conversations. Depending on which apps we download, they know our musical likes and dislikes, our sleeping patterns, our calorie intake and when we exercise (or not). They also now recognize our faces and fingerprints. In other words, our personal devices have made us more “bionic” than ever before.

How did we get here? Monteiro provides a history of home computers and personal technologies. This includes hobbyists in the 1970s who purchased computer kits like the Altair 8800. These kits required a lot of effort to assemble, and often failed to work in the end. When they did function, they “computed” by the user flipping toggle switches rather than through a keyboard or mouse.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Pinker ruminates on common knowledge, human interaction and more in brain-busting new tome

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Preview

Pinker ruminates on common knowledge, human interaction and more in brain-busting new tome

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Devoted readers of the estimable Montreal-born psychologist Steven Pinker know he can get carried away with his own brilliance.

In his 12 previous pop-science books — among them such bestsellers as The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and Enlightenment Now — he has been known to test the patience of his followers with both the complexity and wordiness of his arguments.

His new effort, an often brain-busting disquisition on how so-called common knowledge greases the wheels of human interaction, is no exception.

Here is an unfortunate sentence from page 72 of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... in which he is talking about the logical problems with holding firm beliefs:

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Rose Lincoln / Harvard University
Steven Pinker…TK

New in paper

1 minute read Preview

New in paper

1 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Cher: The Memoir, Part One

By Cher (Dey Street, $27)

The trailblazing singer chronicles her childhood, meeting, marrying and performing with Sonny Bono and the complicated bnature of their relationship.

Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Icelandic literary legend Stefánsson making afternoon book club visit

3 minute read Preview

Icelandic literary legend Stefánsson making afternoon book club visit

3 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are thrilled to welcome prolific Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 25 for a very special noontime meeting, where he’ll read from and discuss his critically acclaimed novel Heaven and Hell.

First published in Icelandic in 2007 and then in English in the early 2010s (with translation by Philip Roughton), Heaven and Hell was picked up by Windsor, Ont. publishing house Biblioasis and re-released in February 2025. The book is the first instalment of what has been dubbed The Trilogy About The Boy; the second book, The Sorrow of Angels, was published on Nov. 4 by Biblioasis, and the third book, The Heart of Man, will be re-released on June 16, 2026.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, Heaven and Hell follows an unnamed narrator, “the boy,” in an Icelandic fishing camp; he befriends Bárður, a young fisherman with a similar love of books. Wintry weather leads to a fatal mistake for Bárður, leaving the boy, already devastated at having lost his family years back, grappling with grief.

The boy is determined to return Bárður’s copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost to the man who had loaned it to him, and then kill himself. But those he meets in his voyage to the man’s village challenge his plans, and what plays out on the subsequent pages is a breathtaking emotional shift.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

New Toews novel coming in 2027: literary mag report

Ben Sigurdson 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Manitoba-born, Toronto-based Miriam Toews visited town recently in support of A Truce That Is Not Peace, her non-fiction musings on why she writes. And according to Publishers Weekly, Toews fans won’t have to wait too long for her next novel.

In a report on recent acquisitions of future books, Publishers Weekly notes that Bloomsbury, Toews’ longtime U.S. publisher, has picked up American rights for “an untitled novel by Miriam Toews, which sees a woman unpack the events leading up to her friend’s mysterious death in a religious town.” The book is slated to be published in fall 2027.

● ● ●

Winnipeg Public Library writer in residence (and Free Press copy editor) Ariel Gordon has put out the call for those looking to join a new writing circle for scribes in any genre.

Renewal of widespread human-rights commitment key

Reviewed by Adele Perry 4 minute read Preview

Renewal of widespread human-rights commitment key

Reviewed by Adele Perry 4 minute read Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Alex Neve’s Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World is a passionate call for a reinvigorated commitment to universal human rights. An Ottawa-based international human rights lawyer, Neve served as the secretary general of Amnesty International for nearly two decades.

Published by House of Anansi Press, Universal book accompanies his role as the 2025 Massey lecturer. This includes visits across Canada, including a recent stop at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights on Nov. 4.

Neve’s through-line is the need to renew our dedication to a robustly universal framework of human rights, one that “applies to everyone, everywhere, always, regardless of who we are, and without exception.” In Universal he argues this is especially pressing in a difficult present where the promises of human right seem far removed, one “riddled with hate, inequality, and disinformation, weighted down with deepening economic injustice, and ravaged by war and genocide.”

Universal makes this case in lively prose supported by Neve’s wide knowledge base. Drawing on four decades of international and local human rights work, Neve offers analysis enlivened by story, memory and example: of his time meeting with Mohammed Salim, a Rohingya refugee who spoke of human rights as a “lifeboat;” the moving events organized by Gitxsan activist Cindy Blackstock and the First Nations Caring Society; or speaking at the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

Read

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025

Post-Second World War film can’t handle weight of material

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

Post-Second World War film can’t handle weight of material

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Friday, Nov. 7, 2025

Looking at the lead-up to the first Nuremberg trials in 1945, this misguided historical drama wastes its intriguing and important source material and squanders some very good actors with a script that feels tonally off.

Writer-director James Vanderbilt has written for the Spider-Man, Independence Day and Scream franchises, as well as making his directorial debut with the serious real-life news drama Truth.

Working here from Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, he’s clearly aiming to balance prestige and popular appeal, trying for a smooth, handsome, Oscar-worthy blend of information and entertainment.

Unfortunately, Nuremberg alternates between over-obvious exposition and oddly glib character beats, without ever conveying the enormity of its historical moment.

Read

Friday, Nov. 7, 2025

November 14, 2025

Notification Settings

Staging Breaking News

Staging Recommended Reads