2 weeks Ago By Ben Waldman
Winnipeg improv troupe Outside Joke recently returned to the lab to conduct some important qualitative research at the exciting intersection of cinematic art and yuletide narrative tradition. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Winnipeg improv troupe Outside Joke recently returned to the lab to conduct some important qualitative research at the exciting intersection of cinematic art and yuletide narrative tradition. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Winnipeg improv troupe Outside Joke recently returned to the lab to conduct some important qualitative research at the exciting intersection of cinematic art and yuletide narrative tradition.
Over the summer, its members were watching, analyzing and falling in love-hate all over again with Hallmark holiday movies. “We spent the hottest days of the year talking about Christmas, watching and devouring as many holiday movies, Hallmarks and Lifetimes that we could find,” says Chadd Henderson, one-sixth of the Outside Joke formula. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS The members of Outside Joke spent the summer watching holiday movies in preparation for their new show.
“With these films there’s a structure and a predictability to the story arc, so we spent many months working together to nail those down and to build the scaffolding for a very different type of show.” For the last three years, Outside Joke has enjoyed a Christmas residency at Prairie Theatre Exchange, where the group has performed its own on-the-spot takes of But this year, the sextet of Henderson, Jane Testar, Andrea del Campo, Robyn Slade, Toby Hughes and Sarah (Mama Cutsworth) Michaelson has turned its attention to Charles Dickens’ heir apparent: the clean-cut holiday film. While many families since 1951 have gathered round the TV set each year with Alastair Sim’s Scrooge, a quickly expanding faction of home viewers instead warms up with films like , shot in Stonewall, 2,300 kilometres northwest of Knoxville.
Recognizing this trend, and desiring a new challenge, Outside Joke decided to change candy-cane lanes, ditching the Dickens in favour of an international holiday juggernaut. premières Wednesday and runs until Dec. 22 on PTE’s Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage.
The new improv endeavour was an intriguing concept because the typical Hallmark film is flat, predictable and formulaic, says Henderson. “And I think that’s why people love them. You know what you’re gonna get every time you watch,” he says.
“And by contrast, people love Outside Joke because they don’t know what they’re going to get,” Slade adds. That’s only partially true. For more than 20 years, the troupe has developed a peerless onstage repartee built around a shared willingness to push humour beyond standard limits.
Outside Joke’s content can’t be predicted, and none of it is pre-written, but the troupe’s reputation for full-fledged improvised theatre precedes them. In assessing the Hallmark genre, the troupe isolated several regular plot elements. Exhibit A: The Hate-Cute.
In Ernst Lubitsch’s 1938 comedy , Gary Cooper met Claudette Colbert in the department store when one needed only a pyjama top and the other needed only the pyjama bottoms. The split purchase is considered by some film scholars as a prime early example of the meet-cute, a creatively contrived romantic path-crossing that unites two disparate narrative trajectories to fit into a single cohesive narrative framework. A + B = C.
But in Hallmark films, Henderson says the romantic leads often begin their courtship from a point of skepticism. “They’re like, ‘Why is this person talking to me, and why are they in my space? And then it evolves, impossibly, over the course of two-and-a-half to three days where they’re very in love before she abandons her old life to start a new one.” Henderson says the troupe locked in quickly to the idea of accelerated feelings and accelerated storylines.
“In a lot of other genres we’ve tackled in the past, those stories are grand or sweeping, but in these stories, things just happen on such a tight timeline, and seeing how much joy we can squeeze out of that became a really fun exercise for us when we were workshopping the show.” While previous Outside Joke performances have been bolstered by the musical stylings of Paul De Gurse, the pianist is currently in Halifax, where he’s serving as musical director for Neptune Theatre’s production of , the smash Disney film’s first Canadian staging. In his place is Sarah Michaelson, a DJ and sound designer known professionally as Mama Cutsworth.
Slade, who joined Outside Joke in 2005, says Michaelson’s ability to select the perfect track for each moment is uncanny. Another regular plot element in Hallmark films, according to Slade and Henderson, is the Hometown Return. “Not always, but often, the characters tend to either go to a small town or go back to their hometown, so the majority of these movies have that small-town feel, where everybody knows eachother.
“We’ll call that the Cheers Convention,” says Henderson. Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop.
Thus, the cast of characters is immediately familiar to viewers who have visited the inn before. “In Hallmark films, we have a lead, we have a lover, and each of those people has a bestie who’s there to support and rally for them,” Slade says. “Then we have an all-knowing sage-like character who not only knows everybody else in the story, but offers some sort of magic, bestowing the lead with a little wink and a smile to push them in the right direction.
” If you want to see a Hallmark film you’ve never seen before, it’s best to consult the experts. ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.
com Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the . Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. .
Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism.
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Prairie Theatre Exchange Opens Wednesday, runs to Dec. 22 Tickets $15-$63 at pte.mb.
ca and only two of these three titles pulled from Andrea del Campo’s IMDb credits are Hallmark features. Can you guess the outlier? Some might consider the gingerbread-sweet Hallmark cinematic universe to be the stuff of a horror franchise unto itself, but not Outside Jokester del Campo, who was an aficionado long before she was cast as a “Marky” herself for the first time in “It was about a successful singer and another singer who claimed the lead had ripped her song off, so the successful singer goes home to find proof that she’d written the song herself,” explains del Campo, a professional actor in Winnipeg. “I played the successful singer’s sister.
” For her audition, del Campo sang Shot in Winnipeg in September 2019, Our Christmas Love Song is one of a Criterion Closet full of holiday features produced in Manitoba by Hallmark — a greeting card and entertainment empire founded in 1910 by an 18-year-old Nebraskan named Joyce Clyde Hall and his brother Rollie — over the past half decade. For hundreds of city actors, designers and set technicians, the Hallmark feature film has become an unexpected gift under the Christmas tree of annual labour and income. The stories on screen may be notoriously saccharine and somewhat repetitive, but the opportunities have been sweet.
“These movies are shot very quickly, within three weeks,” says del Campo, who also acted in 2022’s and 2024’s , the latter a non-Marky starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. “It’s like a machine, and it’s quite remarkable to watch. Something that’s pretty hilarious about this machine is that there are some production centres jammed, floor-to-ceiling, with Christmas stuff, so when you go to your costume fittings, you walk past random Christmas lawn ornaments, various garlands and Christmas tableware, all shoved in warehouses and recycled for shoots.
” The Exchange District — a heritage zone relatively untouched by “modern” developments — has been a boon, standing in as City X in dozens of film projects thanks to its classical, big-city, prewar industrial architecture. “These movies come back every year, they’re shooting all the time. And in an industry that is completely about gig work, it’s a consistent opportunity,” del Campo says.
“At the beginning of the Hallmark boom, newer crew members were cutting their teeth and gaining experience on shoots that were shorter. That’s perfect for people learning how to be on set. It’s been a boon to our community.
” Even though for del Campo the pleasure of Hallmark has become a steady source of work, she doesn’t shy away from the fruits of her labour in her leisure time. “Every year, my husband and I choose three locally made Hallmark films and score them on a seven-category rubric,” she says. Criteria include: Christmassiness; Believability of Chemistry; Decoration Beauty; the Quality of the Best Friends of Love Interests; and whether it puts her in the Christmas spirit.
They’ve been observing the tradition since 2020, over time developing their own holiday version of the Sight and Sound list of the greatest films of all time. “I like the ones with Candace Cameron Bure, but I also really liked That one ranked real high for me,” she says. ben.
[email protected] Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the . Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019.
. Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and .
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider . Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism.
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