Manitoba

RMTC plans 'reimagined season' for January: artistic director

Where many Canadian companies have jettisoned the 2020-21 season altogether, RMTC is still going ahead with a lineup of shows starting in January.

Kelly Thornton is hopeful that a scaled-down lineup of plays will return in the new year

Kelly Thornton, artistic director of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, shut down the first two big shows of the season, but is hoping to salvage some productions yet. (CBC)

Like most theatre companies across the country, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre has had to adapt in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier in June, that adaptation included shutting down the first two significant shows of its season, Network and The Sound of Music.

But where many Canadian companies have jettisoned the 2020-21 season altogether, RMTC is still going ahead with a lineup of shows artistic director Kelly Thornton is calling a "reimagined season," starting in January.

Even so, the scaled-down season does not include some previously announced shows, including playwright Pamela Mala Sinha's New, an examination of Sinha's own roots in its story of a group of immigrants coming from India to Winnipeg in 1970, and the Warehouse show The Runner, about an Israeli medic who saves the life of a Palestinian suicide bomber instead of a soldier.

Most painful for Thornton is the cancellation of the musical Children of God, which was to be the keystone presentation in Thornton's The Bridge program, a "festival of ideas" that was to replace the Master Playwright's Festival. The Bridge has also collapsed… for now.

Read more from the Winnipeg Free Press by clicking here.


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