The Moose Jaw Community Players theatre troupe has gone by several names during its nearly six decades, but one thing has never changed: it puts on entertaining productions and wins awards regularly.
Community theatre has been important to Moose Jaw’s cultural life for decades, and the club has contributed to that scene since 1966 after forming and calling itself Theatre ’67.
Theatre ’67 began a rich tradition for quality theatre with productions of Hadrian VII, Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie, Barefoot in the Park, and others.
After taking a brief hiatus, the club re-emerged as the Community Players and performed memorable productions of Agnes of God, Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii, Peter Pan, The Fantasticks, The Dining Room, and Crimes of the Heart.
In 1989, the group changed its name to Chocolate Moose, while its first production was H.M.S. Pinafore. The club attained international notoriety in 1992 with its collective about Moose Jaw called “Jawin’,” which it performed at the VIII Aruba International Theatre Festival in the Caribbean.
The group changed its name back to the Community Players sometime in the 2000s. It performed several shows a year at the Legion during that decade but received poor reviews and did not make much money.
The club decided in 2010 to start holding Christmas dinner theatre productions and take those shows to TheatreFest the following spring.
The club also moved its dinner theatres to the Cosmo Senior Citizens Centre, where it performed most shows until the pandemic struck. Recently, it built a new relationship with the Cultural Centre — where the Mae Wilson Theatre is — and acquired office space. It now plans to perform several shows a year there.
The pandemic also forced the organization to rebuild and bring on new cast and crew. Some people who have supported the club and helped it rebuild include Debbie Burgher, Joan Stumborg, Crystal Milburn, Nadia Frost, Fiorina Hauck, Jarrod Jeanson and the late Tara Gish.
The group has put on over 100 performances during its 57-year history, while more than 1,000 people have been involved in those productions. Whatever name it’s had, though, the troupe has put on solid productions and won many provincial awards.
According to Theatre Saskatchewan, the first provincial TheatreFest award the club won was in 1978 for best actor in a supporting role in the play “Of Mice and Men.” It won another 20 awards between then and 2006. During more recent competitions, the club won four awards in 2018, seven in 2019, and four in 2022.
The group will not perform at this year’s TheatreOne Festival in May because it just finished its two-night production of “Notoriously Moose Jaw” in late April. Those performances re-told the community’s history through 14 stories using real facts presented in a fictional manner.
Some stories the group performed focused on the 1918 Spanish Flu, Al Capone’s alleged presence here, a mid-air airplane crash in 1954, Queen Elizabeth II’s tour in 1959, the River Park Flood in 1974 and the 2019 Moose Truce with Norway.
With the 1918 pandemic, residents decided — in agreement with parents — that they would remove from homes children whose parents were sick and place them with non-ill families. Furthermore, people donated linens to the hospital and erected field hospitals in schools.
Meanwhile, the flood wiped out River Park Bridge and a small house where a feisty grandmother lived. In the air disaster, a passenger jet smashed into a Harvard trainer, and they fell 10,000 feet before crashing 600 metres from Ross School.
For more information about the Community Players, visit its Facebook page.
The Express thanks the public library archives and Jarrod Jeanson for the background information.
