Join us this Sunday to hear the fabulous news from last year’s10/11 Season.  It’s also a great opportunity to chat with the staff and the Board of Directors about your TPM experiences over coffee and cookies.

Hmmm…cookies and good conversation about theatre…very hard to go wrong with that plan.

We wish you and all your loved ones peace and joy during the festive season and the happiest of new years!

On the eve of In the Chamber: Holiday Special, Playwright Rick Chafe catches up with this year's artists for a glimpse of their new creations.

Every year, Theatre Projects commissions two or more theatre artists to create a new piece for straight-from-the-oven-to-the-audience performance.   December 8-10, In the Chamber: Holiday Special premieres a music/theatre mashup of the artistry of Ellen Peterson and the Fu Fu Chi Chi Choir (aka creative cyclones Sarah Constible and Michelle Boulet plus ten or so best friends) for two plays wrapped in one glittery package.  Rick Chafe stopped the panting artists long enough to get a preview.

Rick: Overview please, what are the two shows in one about?

Sarah: The Fu Fu Chi Chi part takes place in hour 36 of a 12-day Christmas TV marathon. The host, Bobbie Lager, was supposed to be relieved 8 hours ago, and she’s very sick. She shows a selection of musical numbers, each one, coincidentally enough, performed by the choir.

Michelle: And then Sarah and I are sort of the accent in Ellen’s piece, because she’s doing monologues and we’re the ones who give her the chance to change costumes.   We wrote all new songs for the choir for our show, and songs that resonate a lot with Ellen’s themes for hers.

Ellen: Mine is The Eight Tiny Reindeer of the Apocalypse.  It’s about how the end of civilization as we know it is brought to collapse by Christmas.  I play 3 characters over the span of 20 years.  The first is an economics professor who’s seen the signs everywhere and is trying in vain to get people to stop the madness.  Her students wouldn’t listen and she becomes a doomsday prophet, standing out on the corner of Portage and Vaughn.  The next character is a woman who is married and has children, but she had a breakdown the previous year.  She’s trying to get her Christmas mojo together, trying to make the magic happen, but it’s not going very well.  The third is a preacher of a so-called church—but there’s no 2-sentence version of this, so you have to come see.

Rick: Where did the Christmas theme come from?

Ellen: I opened my big yap last year and I said to anyone who would listen, “Oh Christmas!  I’m going to write a show.  And that’s going to be my revenge!  It’s going to be called, Christmas is f****d!”  And then (Theatre Projects Artistic Director) Ardith calls me up and says, “What’s this Christmas idea?”  So I was stuck with writing it.

I guess I realized that Christmas was more than just a problem of my personal stress level.  So I guess the problem is, I still need something from Christmas or I would just not do it.  I’m not a Christian – why can’t I let it go? Why can’t I walk away and say I don’t need it anymore?  What do we all need from Christmas?

Rick: What’s the whole Fu Fu Chi Chi concept?  If you’re a choir, what makes it theatre?

Sarah: It’s an-all female choir.  It started with the Girls! Girls! Girls! Cabaret fundraisers at the Gas Station Theatre.

Michelle: The first two years, Sarah and I did it solo—

Sarah: Or a duet—

Michelle: So we realized we had a bit of a penchant for writing songs together that were also theatrical.   You could put on a funny costume and tell a story without being a folk singer.  So we did two years in a row, the third year we thought we’d make it a choir.  We called up everyone we knew to help.

Sarah: I’d like to have it noted that we’re so lucky to have so many talented friends.  We just call them up and the roster changes, sometimes it’s 3 and sometimes it’s 13 and we adore them so much.

Michelle: And thank God, they’re more musical than us.

Rick: Ellen, you work as a playwright and you work as an actor.  How are you liking the two of them together, as a monologue-ist playwright?

Ellen: I’m happy to say I haven’t made it easy for either one of my selves.  The things I thought would be fun to do as an actor formulated the storywriting in a way.    As a writer I didn’t think about what the actor might be able to pull off.  Both of us are very happy with some cuts I made today.

Rick:  A big part of the Fu Fu Chi Chi experience is the costumes.  Are you going to keep that up for an entire show?

Sarah: That’s her department.

Michelle:  I have sort of conceptualized them so they’re very fast.  It’s not entire costume changes—

Sarah: We want to make it smooth and quick because we don’t have a lot of time.  The songs are only two or three minutes each, no epics, so the costumes have to be instantly recognizable.

Michelle:  But we have a whack of new songs.  We have a narrative that holds the whole thing together.  And we will change costumes.

**

Rick Chafe is a Winnipeg playwright.  His play  Shakespeare’s Dog has received major productions at Manitoba Theatre Centre and Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, and Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects; The Odyssey won Nova Scotia’s Best Production for 2008; in 2009 he was nominated for the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, and his most recent play, The Secret Mask premiered at Prairie Theatre Exchange…weeks ago!

The "Knit the Bridge" Giant Ball of Yarn courtesy Jennifer Smith & Kristen Nelson (and over 117 other local knitters)will be installed in the theatre lobby!

TPM is getting crafty with our Holiday Special themed In the Chamber!

To compliment the performance on stage, we’ve invited local artists to display and sell their handmade creations in the lobby.

There will be a variety of items, from original gift cards & writing journals to hand printed t-shirts, beautiful felted creatures & hand sewn monsters! Expect a little cheekiness and a lot of talent!

Here’s the Handmade line up:

• Heather Bays
• Tamara Rae Biebrich:  lady.t tees
• Maurice & Jeanette Dzama
• Kami Goertz: Marathon 1981
• Andee Penner: Sew Dandy
• Alix Sobler: Summertime Crafts

So arrive early and bring cash!  We’ll even have hand stamped wrapping paper and an elf or two to tie up your packages.  Oh…did we mention the photo booth?!

The Fu Fu Chi Chi Choir  Photo:  Leif Norman l to r:  Michelle Boulet, Jacqueline Loewen, Sarah Constible, Janice Skene, Elizabeth Quesnel & Marina Stephenson Kerr

In the Chamber 2011:  Holiday Special

Featuring Ellen Peterson & The Fu Fu Chi Chi Choir

Directed by Ardith Boxall

8PM December 8th, 9th & 10th

The Asper Centre for Theatre & Film – University of Winnipeg Campus – 400 Colony (Entrance from Balmoral)

TPM is preparing for the holidays – constructing a darkly comic theatrical tonic for the madness of the season.  Ellen Peterson and the Fu Fu Chi Chi Choir are the elves In the Chamber workshop, building us two new plays.

This year our writer/performer series that begs for the personal explores our society’s relationship to the holidays, our economy and the individual pursuit for meaning in the current economic climate.

Ellen Peterson brings us The Eight Tiny Reindeer of The Apocalypse and the Fu Fu Chi Chi will give us a playlet in four part harmony, so fa la la promises to be ha ha ha – we hope you can join us!

With just three performances, seating is limited - get your tickets now!

Read more about the artists and the show…

Two Chekhov enthusiasts, Mike Bell and Bruce McManus, met for coffee to discuss the impending world premiere, 11 years in the making, of Bruce’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

Scene:

Mike enters Bruce’s home.  Bruce offers coffee.  Mike can’t say no because he loves “the java”.  During the interview, sometimes Bruce stands up to get coffee.  But, for the most part, Mike and Bruce are sitting at the kitchen table.

MIKE:  Why is the story of Three Sisters important to you?

BRUCE: It resonated with me because the theme of happiness has dropped out of literature to some extent.  Except for children’s literature. The characters in the play need to find some kind of place in the world, but also find happiness.  Find happiness whatever that is…whatever that means.  It’s intriguing to me.

MIKE:  What do you find more challenging?  Writing an original play or adapting a pre-existing one?

BRUCE:  With my own plays I’ve lived through that period.  Adaptations you have to research time, place, and who the characters represented in their own time.  And when you’ve got the story and structure most of your work is done. Yet you still feel this obligation to enlighten and enhance what is there.  That poses its own challenges.  But there’s no easy writing. Everything’s hard about writing.

MIKE:  How would you describe Chekhov as a writer?

BRUCE:  Chekhov comes closest to the notion of granting playwrights the rights and liberties of a poet.  He wrote powerful speeches about a character’s longings, hopes, and exhilarations.  And it also seems clear, to some extent, he’s both mocking his characters and showing great sympathy.  I think that’s why he’s embraced.  Chekhov brought the humanness of the audience together with the humanness of the characters.

MIKE:  In 1998, PTE produced your adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.  What did you learn from that experience when it came time to work on Chekhov’s play?

BRUCE:  I found a method of approaching other playwrights’ work. I would read the play over and over and over again..then I forgot about it.   That is…I was writing the play from “memory”, scene by scene.  And I wrote each scene with my own understanding and insight.   I always try to observe a consistent tone with the original, but with a new set and setting.

MIKE:  So why Moose Jaw?  What prompted the decision to set your adaptation of Three Sisters in 1959 Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan?

BRUCE: Well, I spent 6 to 8 years there as a kid in the late 50′s early 60′s. I understood small town society very well.  Who had power…who had authority…which is important to any Chekhovian location.  And the social conditions the Three Sisters faced in Russia weren’t too different with what they faced in Moose Jaw at that time.  But they have an important air base there.  My Dad and Uncle were both in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  My uncle was a pilot in World War II.  I thought of the veterans and their wives, girlfriends, and sisters in my family.  I always wanted to write about those people and their lives out of war.  Their hopes, disappointments, and expectations of a glorious future.

MIKE:  So you’ve had a good experience working with Chekhov?

BRUCE:  I’ve enjoyed it.  But I won’t be sorry to have Chekhov no longer with me.  His characters suffer too much.

MIKE:  What do you hope the audience takes away from this production?

BRUCE:   I want them to really enjoy themselves.  Whatever that means.  If people are thinkers…I want them to think a lot.  If people just want to watch the struggles and joys of life…let them enjoy….

MIKE:  Well, congratulations and all the best for a great run.   So…if you don’t mind…a traditional Russian toast.

(Mike holds out his coffee mug)

MIKE:   Za Vas.

(Bruce clinks his coffee mug with Mike’s)

BRUCE:  Thank you.

Bruce’s Three Sisters will receive its world premiere October 6th, 2011 – a zone41 theatre production in association with Theatre Projects Manitoba. Purchase Tickets now!

Mike Bell wrote and acted in the one man show Chekhov and Me, which premiered at TPM’s inaugural  In the Chamber in 2006.

-Anton Chekhov in a letter to A.S. Suvorin, Dec. 27, 1889

By Anton Chekhov

Adapted by Bruce McManus

October 6th – 16th, 2011

Canwest Centre for Theatre and Film

University of Winnipeg Campus – 400 Colony (entrance from Balmoral)

Directed by Christopher Brauer

Featuring an ensemble cast of 11!

a zone41 theatre production

110 years since the original opened at the Moscow Arts Centre. McManus has moved the action from turn of the century Russia and centered it instead on The Royal Canadian Air Force Base at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in the late 1950′s. In doing so he weaves a prairie story from the essential threads of the original remaining faithful to the tragic comedy of Chekhov’s characters in an environment often hostile to dreams.

Three Sisters explores our obsessive desire to look elsewhere, to ignore our reality in pursuit of an imagined salvation, and confronts us with the impossibly perfect designs we hang on both our past and future.

Three Sisters has an artistic team of 20!  Learn more about the artists and the show on the Three Sisters Page on this site.

On October 6th, 2011,  Theatre Projects Manitoba is launching our 22nd season with zone41 theatre’s production of  Bruce McManus’ Three Sisters.  We are excited to partner with them for their inaugural production and  introduce our audiences to this new theatre company committed to reimagining classics.

We asked Matthew Handscombe – one half of zone41 to describe the genesis of  their new company .

Matthew Handscombe:

“Two years ago this fall, our lives changed.  It began with a show, Tom-Tom’s co-op production of The Winter’s Tale that was a revelation to me as an audience member and just had the magic for Krista as a veteran actor.  If you were lucky enough to have seen it, you too may fondly recall how Christopher Brauer and his team of actors were able to transform two trestles, a door and a piano into the richest of sets.  The quality of the work being done on stage was staggering and moments of obvious, unbridled joy were received by the audience with vocal thanks.  I wasn’t the only one in tears.

Now no amount of money could have made that show more resonant and it could be argued that the magic may have been rooted in the can-do-it-ness a series of zeros ending budget lines engenders.  But we could both see that Winnipeg was at risk of losing some tremendous talent; not to the fame and fortune other cities might provide, but to simply trying to make a living wage doing what they love and were in many cases professionally trained to do.  If we could step in and provide another regular professional opportunity for our theatre community, that was worth doing.

During the run of The Winter’s Tale, Krista read Bruce McManus’ unproduced Chekhov adaptation – Three Sisters – our fate was sealed and we knew that we were in it.  Deep.  Long her dream to start a company that focused on classics, we incorporated within a month and began the grant writing process necessary to getting most arts projects off the ground in Canada.  I can’t now, having gone through it, imagine averagely tenacious people pulling a show like this off uncompromised.  Thank goodness for us, Krista is several notches above average in this regard.

And here I am, two years on, applying some of what I’ve learned in business and very little of what I learned as a librarian to helping run zone41 theatre – named after the mosquito-fogging area in Wolesley where we and so many of the city’s theatre artists make their home.  Bruce has graced us with an exquisite, absolutely Chekhovian adaptation that we have helped him to hone over the last year and Christopher Brauer has worked tirelessly, providing us with the best of his fearsome intellect as well as wise counsel, having formed his own company prior to landing in Winnipeg.   We have managed to surround ourselves with a thick padding of talent that serves to protect us from the occasional mis-step partly due to Bruce’s involvement, partly because of Christopher, partly because of Chekhov, in no small part because of Krista, in part because of the ethos we’re presenting and in part, it must be said, due to the paycheques we will be providing.”

On the occasion of TPM’s 20th anniversary, interviews abounded and video was shot… Theatre Projects was made a movie star. Produced and directed by Gordon Tanner, the footage became a 16 minute documentary called Between Then and Now: 20 Years of Theatre Projects Manitoba for MTS On Demand.

Now you have a chance to see Between Then and Now: 20 Years of Theatre Projects Manitoba on a double bill from MTS on Demand with the premiere of The Book of Vaudeville in support of Winnipeg’s Performing Arts Lodge.

MTS Winnipeg on Demand Presents a Farpoint Films Production

The Book of Vaudeville Premiere

A Fundraiser for the Performing Arts Lodge of Winnipeg

Friday, September 23

Two Screenings: 1:30pm & 7:00pm

Aqua Books

274 Garry Street

Winnipeg, Manitoba

This is a fundraiser for the Performing Arts Lodge of Winnipeg (PAL). Tickets are $20 (cash sales only please) and are available in advance at Aqua Books, Theatre Projects Manitoba (204-245 McDermot Ave) and the Farpoint Films office at 202-1335 Erin St.

Click here to watch the trailer for The Book of Vaudville on YouTube

Click here to read more details in the press release