Kingston Theatre Alliance

At Come Play By The Lake, short works by local playwrights take to the Domino Theatre stage and compete for a place in the Eastern Ontario Drama League (EODL)’s One Act Festival.  Ranging from 25 to 55 minutes in length and spanning multiple genres—the 2024 submissions include horror, romance, comedy, and metatheatre—the productions are evaluated by a panel of judges selected from the local arts community. This year, Donna Chambers, […]

Shanique Peart is a Kingston-based multidisciplinary artist who mixes performance and media, with a focus on dance and photography. She’s also a delightful person to chat with—we met for the first time last week, and within minutes it felt like catching up with an old friend.  With two artist residencies and a festival performance around the corner, Peart has a full summer of creative projects planned. As we sat in […]

Alone at last? Not so for the characters of Left Alone at Domino Theatre. Domino’s annual one-act play festival, ‘Come Play by the Lake,’ will be staged July 5-6, 2024, featuring four one-act plays. Left Alone by J. Wes Secord begins the performances this year, and I had the opportunity to sit down with Secord and learn about their experience writing and staging the play.  This interview has been edited […]

The rain never bothered us anyway! At least not at this year’s SPAF. Skeleton Park Arts Festival (SPAF), a grassroots, multidisciplinary art festival, takes place every summer over the solstice weekend in McBurney—more commonly known as Skeleton—Park. With a humble beginning over twenty years ago as a neighbourhood solstice picnic, this free, family-oriented festival has become a beloved and highly-anticipated event in the community. This year’s celebration fell over the […]

The cardinal rules of theatre: sit still, don’t chitchat, and make sure your phone is on silent and put away. Adrienne Wong chooses to challenge these conventions, exploring our relationships with our devices through audience participation. 

The 2024 Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), produced by SpiderWebShowPerformance, took place from June 13-15. In this section (catch Part One here!), I take a deep dive into SmartSmart, an interactive performance by Adrienne Wong that was staged at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. In my previous review of FOLDA 2024, I mentioned that the festival promotes innovation, creativity, and reflection, and SmartSmart very much embodies these values.

Summer solstice is just around the corner, and the sun has been bragging about it all week long. When it’s unbearably hot out, Skeleton Park (officially McBurney Park) is one of my favourite places to seek refuge—the trees offer generous shade, and there’s usually a light breeze to cut through the humidity that clings to the lakeside city air.  It’s no coincidence that, on the longest days of the year, […]

Where can you catch a groovy concert, talk to a multimedia AI interface, and take in a 360-degree film in a dome, all in one weekend? FOLDA, of course!  The Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), produced by SpiderWebShowPerformance, promotes live digital art with the hopes of empowering communities, creating connections, and inspiring critique. The 2024 festival took place from June 13-15, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity […]

Kingston’s annual Festival of Live Digital Arts (FOLDA) is once again on the horizon (and no, that is not a pun directed at HORIZON 360°—a film in this year’s lineup). As a hectic week is underway for the team and busy schedules abound in summer months, I conducted an eight-question email interview with Co-Curator Michael Wheeler about an intensive run alongside FOLDA in partnership with Ingenuity Labs: The StartUp. This […]

It’s family drama and first crushes, with a side of baseball. Directed by Penny Nash and staged by Domino Theatre, Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982) is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy. It centres around the Jerome family through the perspective of the youngest son, fifteen year-old Eugene Morris Jerome (William Mitchell). Living in Brooklyn, the Jewish-Polish immigrant family experience personal hardships and conflict under the threat of impending war. Meanwhile, […]

On the day of her mother’s wake, Amelia finds herself at a loss for what to wear. It doesn’t help that her dead mum keeps appearing in her childhood bedroom, all smiles and chatter.  Written by Chloe Whitehorn and directed by Will Britton, Dressing Amelia unpacks mother-daughter baggage through quippy digs, impassioned speeches, and the ever-tantalizing promise that dirty laundry will be aired. A little bit soap opera, a little […]

The night Menopause The Musical 2: Cruising Through ‘The Change’ came to Kingston, my mother was in town, so naturally I invited her along as a guest expert.  She’d seen the original Menopause The Musical on tour several years ago and hadn’t enjoyed it much, offering such sizzling critiques as “I think there’s a certain type of ‘hilarious’ humour that I don’t like,” and “I hate the Beach Boys.” Ever […]

It’s tough being a drama critic at the best of times. For Brooklyn-based theatre journalist Mortimer Brewster (Danny Lalonde), the drama is seeping into his home life at a worrying pace.  Mortimer has just promised to marry his long-term girlfriend, Elaine (Wendy Stephen), when a chance peek into his aunts’ window seat reveals that life in the Brewster household is not all as it seems. Aunt Abby (Charlene Wehlau) and […]