Winnipeg may not have the biggest theatre scene, but that did not stop these high school students from building a community around it. Nearly at the center of it all is Marley Passante, a grade 12 student at the Maples Met School and one of the original founders of Theatre Hub.
Theatre Hub is a student-led group where students in grades nine through 12 across all three Met Schools collaborate to produce plays. Passante said that students are able to participate as cast and crew, and students in grades 10 through 12 make up the managing roles of the productions.
The group also invites mentors to guide fight choreography and vocal warm-ups, Passante said.
Passante started the theatre group after they performed in She Kills Monsters in grade 10 and wanted to form closer bonds with students from the other Met Schools. That was when Passante’s teacher suggested making a theatre group spanning across all three Met Schools. From then on, Passante started reaching out to and collaborating with Met School students, including Ehrian Lane Federis, Jaxon German and Tatiana Tuazon. With advisors Emma Gehrs-Whyte from Maples Met School and Terri Willard from Seven Oaks Met School, they started Theatre Hub.
The hub produced CLUE in 2025, and this year they will be performing a celebrated play — A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.
Passante said the Met School students involved in Theatre Hub are interested in putting on plays that are less mainstream for their age group.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be well known, but the students are setting themselves apart from other student productions by using the original language, promising an entertaining production to audiences.
“Not a lot of people like to do [A Midsummer Night’s Dream], especially in the Shakespearean language that we are doing it in, because we did not grab a modern translation,” they said.
“It’s going to be a fun time,” Passante promised.
Theatre Hub’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will take place at the Seven Oaks Performing Arts Centre at 7 p.m. on May 6. Tickets are $5 for students and $10 for adults.
Supplied by Marley Passante.
