Community News — Kingston Theatre Alliance

What parts of yourself are you hiding? What do you filter out? Is it safe to be heard? Listen, I’ll be honest—things weren’t going too well for me last Friday. After forgetting my glasses, taking the bus to the wrong venue, and discovering that the lone ballpoint pen at the bottom of my purse had run dry, I almost gave up on seeing What Brings You In.  Luckily, the Kick […]

Hysterical Historical Improv delivers on its promise of making history hysterical. From local group Improv Kingston, local history comes to life in a way you haven’t seen before. Dan Walmsley directs, writes, and performs, with the help of additional performers Jon Britton and Henry Korba-Babcock (as well as occasional promised special guests, although none appeared in the performance I attended).  The premise of this “historical improv” is that Walmsley has […]

A stage set with only a wooden cross draped in lingerie, Christian Slut puts the sexual content right back into a Christian upbringing. The show is a one-person “confessional” (not the Catholic kind), written and performed by Erik Karklins, about their experiences as a self-identified slut while also being a devout Christian. They tease (literally) out the nuances between these two seemingly conflicted identities, critiquing restrictive religious doctrine. Despite its […]

Taking the “sketch” in sketch comedy perhaps a little too literally, A Sketchy Kind of Show is a performance by Collected Novellas, who are self-described as focusing on “subversion, quirkiness and social commentary.” Unfortunately, I found the show itself a little lukewarm on all three counts.  The performance held potential with its interesting start—it begins with a framing device of God flipping through Netflix on the seventh day of rest […]

It’s the last show of the 2024 Kick & Push Festival—Basement Girl, a play about PhD student Jovana navigating her new life in Canada while dealing with some eerie sounds in her apartment. Director, playwright, and actor behind Jovana, Bojana Babić was kind enough to sit down with me this past week for a Zoom interview about the show.  This interview has been edited for clarity and length.  Could you […]

Artistic work that’s been a part of the Kick & Push Festival for several years now, the Cedar Island Residency returns for 2024 and this year’s creations will be shared today. By collaborating with Parks Canada to make this residency possible, the work on Cedar Island began just under one week ago on August 12th. With a busy past few days of creation, myself and B. Solomon—a creator in the […]

The 2024 Kick & Push Festival is well underway with their upcoming closing weekend ending on a bang. With just over half the programming still remaining in its final days, wonderfully fabulous artists and their innovative creations will be leaving their mark on the Tett Centre, Cedar Island, City Park, and more. Amongst them is Seymour Irons—a man who wears many artistic hats but we’ll dive into that later—and his […]

Mercury is in retrograde at Kingston Fringe this August as the stars collide in Death of a Starman, starring real life astrologer Zaid Bustami. I had the pleasure of chatting with co-writer and director of the show, Kay Komizara, about toxic masculinity, storytelling, and of course, the stars. Komizara has been a creator for the last 11 years, having worked in Victoria, Montreal, and is now touring Ontario for Death […]