The Arts

Music

An illustration of Pantages Theatre made by Number Ten Architectural Group in 2025. (Supplied)

Province chips in $15M to bring Pantages Playhouse back to life

Gabrielle Piché 5 minute read Updated: Yesterday at 4:53 PM CDT

A string quartet performed at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre Tuesday in celebration of a $15-million contribution from the province to raise the curtain at the historic landmark again.

The musicians provided the backdrop to Premier Wab Kinew’s announcement of the cash injection to “help bring the Pantages Playhouse back to life.”

The theatre — which opened in 1914 and was once a hub for vaudeville performers, including Charlie Chaplin — has been closed for eight years.

“This is a tremendous project to advance arts and culture in Winnipeg and across Manitoba, but it’s also a big investment in our downtown,” Kinew said.

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The Arts

Lucasfilm photo The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu in The Mandalorian

Celebrate May 4 with series from Star Wars universe

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Preview

Celebrate May 4 with series from Star Wars universe

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read Monday, May. 4, 2026

May the Fourth be with you.

Today is Star Wars Day and, to celebrate this unofficial holiday — and the upcoming theatrical release of The Mandalorian and Grogu later this month — we thought we’d take a little dig into other stories from the Star Wars universe beyond the core three trilogies: the original (Episodes IV-VI, 1977 to 1983), the prequel (Episodes I-III, 1999 to 2005) and the sequel (Episodes VII-IX, 2015 to 2019). And yes, we know about Andor, but we’re keeping this to the pew-pew-pew Star Wars, not political drama Star Wars.

^

● The Mandalorian (2019-2023)

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Monday, May. 4, 2026

The Arts

Arthur Horsfall. Mohawk Block, 1979. Oil on canvas. Winnipeg Art Gallery, Acquired with funds from The Winnipeg Foundation, G-89-1492 a-e

The view from here

3 minute read Preview

The view from here

3 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 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.

Arthur Horsfall. Mohawk Block, 1979. Oil on canvas. Winnipeg Art Gallery, Acquired with funds from The Winnipeg Foundation, G-89-1492 a-e.

Mohawk Block captures a familiar Winnipeg setting with striking scale and detail. The artist Arthur Horsfall was born in Winnipeg in 1915.

This pentaptych (five-panel painting) depicts the historic building at Logan Avenue and King Street, constructed in 1882. It was later the site of the longstanding Winnipeg Oriental Market.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Music

Dahlia Katz photo Cimmeron Meyer designed Rubaboo’s striking set.

Magical, moving Métis musical feels like homecoming ceremony

Sonya Ballantyne 5 minute read Preview

Magical, moving Métis musical feels like homecoming ceremony

Sonya Ballantyne 5 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Back in the day, when having Cree ancestry was not as in vogue as it is now, having a Métis connection was largely acceptable because it was only “half-Cree.”

For some of us, it was only through that acceptable connection that we were able to hang on to our indigeniety at all; Métis roots were a way to keep Cree roots alive.

Roots, jigging and connection are the main ingredients of Rubaboo: A Métis Cabaret, the season-ending show at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Written by Flin Flon-born Andrea Menard with music by Menard and Robert Walsh, this 85-minute show is part sharing circle and part guitar mass, looking at Prairie Métis history through song and storytelling.

Menard guides us as the cabaret’s storyteller, while also playing the hand drum and singing. She is joined onstage by Walsh on guitar and hand drum, Nathen Aswell on Chapman stick, and the fantastic Karen Donaldson Shepherd on percussion and fiddle. All three musicians provide vocals.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

The Arts

Mark S. Rash photo Maggie Weatherdon (left) and Marco Lo Presti in Dwight Roden’s Odyssey

Terrific trio

Holly Harris 7 minute read Preview

Terrific trio

Holly Harris 7 minute read Friday, May. 1, 2026

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet trumpeted both its illustrious past and promising future as it kicked off its season-closer, The Four Seasons and Other Works, Thursday.

The bill, featuring a trio of contemporary ballets, officially wraps up the RWB’s new artistic director Christopher Stowell’s inaugural season at the helm (though this 134-minute mixed bill is the final production programmed by former artistic director Andre Lewis before he stepped down last season).

Stowell has firmly settled in with dynamic, ambitious programming, as well as an ever-expanding treasure trove of more unfamiliar dance artists for local balletomanes.

One of those is award-winning American choreographer Dwight Rhoden, with the world première of his Odyssey plunging the multi-generational audience into an abstract landscape propelled by heightened kineticism and razor-sharp angularity.

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Friday, May. 1, 2026

The Arts

Chelsey Stuyt Photography Otosan follows the adventures of plucky protagonist Shizu and her father in the Arctic.

Powerful family drama played out with puppets

Holly Harris 6 minute read Preview

Powerful family drama played out with puppets

Holly Harris 6 minute read Tuesday, Apr. 28, 2026

Otosan makes a compelling case that a powerful theatrical experience doesn’t necessarily require grand sets, elaborate costumes, complicated, complex storylines — or for that matter, even spoken dialogue — to create deeply resonant, human stories that pierce the heart.

And the fact that this 45-minute play’s cast of characters are not made of flesh and bone, but 21st-century thermoplastics along with other bits and bobs, brought to life by four puppeteers, is further testament as to what true artistry is capable of.

Manitoba Theatre for Young People closes its season with the British Columbia-based Little Onion Puppet Company’s Otosan, a semi-autobiographical tale penned by Vancouver playwright/puppet maker/director Shizuka Kai.

The award-winning touring production, co-created with Randi Edmundson and Jess Amy Shead, opened Friday and runs weekends through May 17 at the company’s intimate Richardson Studio Theatre.

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Tuesday, Apr. 28, 2026

The Arts

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Daughter and father communicate without words in Otosan.

Wordless puppet show explores father-daughter ties

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

Wordless puppet show explores father-daughter ties

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Friday, Apr. 24, 2026

Having a parent who travels for work is a challenge for any child, but whenever Shizuka Kai’s father left on a voyage to capture elusive footage of white wolves and kodiaks, there was an element of danger that didn’t exist for other children.

“I would say I kind of grew up with my dad telling us that he actually might not come home,” says Kai, a Vancouver-based puppet maker and theatre artist. “A moment I vaguely remember as a kid was when he sat us down and explained the life-insurance process because (he) might actually get attacked and eaten by a bear, and that’s the reality of this project (he was) doing.”

That reality is put through a puppeteer’s lens in Otosan, the closing production of the 2025-2026 season at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

Based on Kai’s experiences growing up as the child of a dogged wildlife videographer, combined with memories from a joint trip to Alaska in Kai’s early 20s, Otosan — on to May 17 — is told in a wordless tabletop puppet show featuring lifelike renderings of father, daughter, grizzly bear and snowy owl.

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Friday, Apr. 24, 2026

The Arts

Photo from Dead of Winter Notinikew (i went to war) was recorded by Dead of Winter with members of the Winnipeg Boys’ Choir at the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist, St. John’s College, at the University of Manitoba.

Stirring oratorio pays homage to Indigenous veterans

Conrad Sweatman 7 minute read Preview

Stirring oratorio pays homage to Indigenous veterans

Conrad Sweatman 7 minute read Friday, Apr. 24, 2026

‘My war wasn’t in Europe. My war was when I came back to Canada and I couldn’t vote until 1962,” says composer Andrew Balfour.

He’s paraphrasing a quote by an Indigenous veteran and the inspiration for his oratorio notinikew (i went to war).

Its soaring choral and orchestral soundscapes have been captured by Dead of Winter on a new record, which was launched in the Manitoba Legislative Building’s neo-classical Rotunda on Wednesday, hosted by MLA David Pankratz, Special Envoy for Military Affairs.

A central narrative voice in notinikew is an Indigenous sniper, based on an actual man from Norway House who ultimately found himself in France’s killing fields during the First World War.

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Friday, Apr. 24, 2026

The Arts

Matt Duboff photo The Debaters, with host Steve Patterson, is returning to its birthplace: the Winnipeg Comedy Festival.

Debaters returns to Winnipeg Comedy Festival

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Preview

Debaters returns to Winnipeg Comedy Festival

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Thursday, Apr. 23, 2026

Is Big Oil a good thing for Canada? Do butter tarts beat Nanaimo bars? Should Canada become the 51st state? Is Velcro better than laces?

It may sound like you’re overhearing snatches of conversation from both the kids and adult tables of a family party, rather than questions posed on the CBC Radio One program The Debaters.

However, the weekly family-friendly program on CBC’s primary radio news service has always been a little more fun than factual, a little more whimsy than weighty.

“I prefer when it’s got a little bit of meat to it,” says Steve Patterson, the Ontario comedian who has hosted the show since 2007.

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Thursday, Apr. 23, 2026

Celebrities

Ruth Bonneville / Free Press Berkley Silverman in Ride at WJT

Musical tale of emancipation a real tour de force

Ben Waldman 6 minute read Preview

Musical tale of emancipation a real tour de force

Ben Waldman 6 minute read Tuesday, Apr. 21, 2026

Aspiring reporter Annie Londonderry (Berkley Silverman) has a story to tell the readers of the World, so she arrives at the newspaper’s headquarters, the tallest building in New York City in the year 1894.

Dressed to stunt on Manhattan publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer, Londonderry, like The Music Man’s Prof. Harold Hill, knows the perfect pitch is as much in its delivery — disguised, exaggerated, situational — as its velocity and release point.

To borrow a snippet of ballpark scout-speak, Londonderry — and by extension, Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s Canadian première of Ride, by British playwrights Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams — displayed elite stuff on opening night, from the moment Silverman and co-star Colleen Furlan squeeze together for an elevator ride to the top of the world.

It’s the mid-1890s, and Pulitzer — a Hungarian-born Jew who’d been rejected by Austrian, British, and French militaries before fighting for the Union Army in the American Civil War at 17 — is engaged in friendly fire with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

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Tuesday, Apr. 21, 2026

Opinion

Credible journalism takes time, effort, human intelligence

Jen Zoratti 6 minute read Saturday, Apr. 18, 2026

There’s an idiom in journalism: the goat must be fed.

The proverbial goat has changed over the years. It used to be the next day’s paper. Then it was the 24-hour news cycle. Then the 12-hour news cycle. Then it was websites.

Those pages, those hours, those constantly refreshing sites — they all must be fed. The goat can never go hungry because a fed goat is a fed public. But then suddenly there were so many goats, with ever-bigger appetites, and keeping them fed became impossible.

So it’s not entirely surprising to me, as someone whose two decades in journalism has overlapped with the advent of blogs, the boom and bust of digital media, multiple “pivots to video” and the credo “do more with less,” that AI has become an appealing tool to “feed the goat.”

Celebrities

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Mycze Cutler, musical director at the Crescent Arts Centre, will be playing the organ to accompany the moving images Saturday at the inaugural Winnipeg Silent Film Festival.

Wealth of musical talent providing the sounds of silents

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

Wealth of musical talent providing the sounds of silents

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Thursday, Apr. 16, 2026

The score will be settled in real time on Saturday at the inaugural Winnipeg Silent Movie Festival, with local musicians set to provide live, improvised soundtracks to 10 films released between 1912 and 1929.

In order to meet the challenge, Mycze Cutler will rely on an instrument that predates any of the festival’s selections from the pre-sound era: a Casavant pipe organ, installed at the Crescent Fort Rouge United Church in 1911, one year before Lillian Gish made her film debut.

Used every week for worship, the Quebec-made instrument — equipped with strings, flutes and horns, as well as more than 2,000 pipes — will be employed by Cutler to improvise live scores to the festival’s closing projections, The Haunted House and One Week, both starring the inimitable Buster Keaton.

Cutler, the church’s music director, is used to improvising during services depending on the mood of the day’s hymns and the content of the sermon. As an accompanist for upcoming run of The Pirates of Penzance (opening April 24) from the musical theatre program of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Cutler has a clear plan to follow.

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Thursday, Apr. 16, 2026

The Arts

Ruth Bonneville / Free Press Berkley Silverman (left) and Colleen Furlan star in the story of Annie Londonderry’s 1894 trip around the world on her bicycle.

Story of first women to cycle around the world a freewheeling, perilous trek

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

Story of first women to cycle around the world a freewheeling, perilous trek

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Wednesday, Apr. 15, 2026

In Ride, the musical that closes the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre season, a Latvian-born American woman with an unmistakably Jewish surname attempts to circumnavigate the globe on two wheels in 15 months or less just before the sharp turn of the 20th century.

But as she speeds toward renown on her Columbia bicycle, pedalling her way toward becoming a proto-feminist model for women’s independence, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky — born in 1870, died in 1947 — faces a fork in the road: to retain her heritage, or to ease her passage across borders through the all-too-common sacrifice of acceptance through anglicization.

For director-choreographer Lisa Stevens, the production is relevant in 2026 for the same reasons that the story of “Annie Londonderry” was captivating in 1894.

“We’re still asking the same questions: who gets to be seen, who gets to be heard, who gets to be believed and how one needs to reinvent themselves, or hide, to be able to survive,” says Stevens. “Who has to change their persona in order to thrive?” As the rider asks, “How far do I have to go in order to move forward?”

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Wednesday, Apr. 15, 2026

The Arts

Laser’s blue light gives green light to enter world of pure imagination

Laser’s blue light gives green light to enter world of pure imagination

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Preview

Laser’s blue light gives green light to enter world of pure imagination

Ben Waldman 5 minute read Sunday, Apr. 12, 2026

Before the humans take the stage at the beginning of Glitch, the audience’s senses are already activated.

Throughout the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, it’s cloudy. Over the sound system, pipes drip. Through squinted eyes, one can almost make out a staircase and the downward swoop of a curtain. “I have a question,” a young girl asks her grandmother before the matinee production begins. “Why is it so foggy?”

The fog is a stand-in for the plumes of dust that one might find in the basement of an abandoned theatre, where four friends — Carlos Mendoza, Léa Noblet Di Ziranaldi, Chloé Ouelle-Payeur & Marie-Ève Dion — stumble onto a world of balletic make-believe.

As they head down the staircase, the friends cross flashlight beams. When the quartet takes its first collective steps, each member is reluctant: what transpires is a testament to the transformative power of a performative green light — a signal to go where you’ve never gone before.

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Sunday, Apr. 12, 2026

The Arts

Suzane ONeill photo Glitch tells its story through body language, which has allowed it to travel to dozens of countries.

Projection device guides playful excursion of discovery

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Preview

Projection device guides playful excursion of discovery

Ben Waldman 4 minute read Wednesday, Apr. 8, 2026

When Hélène Langevin looks back at her childhood, her memory often travels downstairs.

The basement of her grandmother’s house in Trois Rivières, Que., is where the Montreal-based choreographer first practised the time-honoured tradition of snooping for inspiration.

Inside steam chests and armoires, she found finely preserved wedding dresses, tutus, top hats and canes — just a few of the narrative materials necessary for transformation, disguise and devised theatrical escape.

A few years ago, with the pandemic shuttering theatres across the country, Langevin returned to those early experiments in self-discovery and forgivable mischief.

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Wednesday, Apr. 8, 2026

The Arts

Joe Bryksa / FREE PRESS files Rita Menzies was a force to be reckoned with in Manitoba’s classical musical landscape.

Musicians celebrate beloved late classical administrator

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Preview

Musicians celebrate beloved late classical administrator

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Saturday, Mar. 28, 2026

When Rita Menzies died last spring, musicians across the city echoed a common sentiment in interviews and eulogies: she didn’t just cultivate Manitoba’s classical musical landscape, she helped create it.

A pioneering director of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the administrator who also led the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (twice) during crucial periods is being honoured at a tribute concert on Wednesday.

Whether or not you’ve heard of Menzies, known as much for her self-effacing ways as her diplomacy, determination and savvy, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard of the musicians who perform at this concert.

“I approached many of the most important classical musicians in Winnipeg and asked them if they’d like to be part of this concert. And every single one said yes, they’d love to,” says Paul Marleyn, cellist and artistic director of Agassiz Chamber Music Festival, with which Menzies had a longtime association.

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Saturday, Mar. 28, 2026

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