Kingston Theatre Alliance

Two Filipina nurses walk into Arborfield Memorial Hospital. You won’t believe what happens next! Marie Beath Badian was inspired to write Prairie Nurse by real people, including her mom, a nurse who immigrated from the Philippines to Canada, Penny, another Filipina nurse, and Pat Hackett, a candy striper at the hospital. Prairie Nurse is bright, energetic, and bears all the markers of a TV sit-com—wild misunderstandings, over the top characters, […]

A new Canadian farce! Playing in the Springer Theatre until August 18, The Canadian by this new whimsical physical comedy world premiered by Thousand Islands Playhouse – takes the audience through a whirlwind of events so calculated and carefully timed that they could all crumbling down upon an accidental early entrance or line fumble. Director Rob Kempson reflects upon this in his Director’s Note, equating a farce to a “complex […]

Upon entering the Firehall theatre, there was a sense of familiarity. The stage was dressed as a pub, complete with TV screens playing soccer games (or, since Midsummer is set in Edinburgh, “football” games) and the sound of chatter and dishes that blended smoothly into the sound of the audience talking amongst themselves. In his director’s note, Brett Christopher refers to the universality of the story that is about to […]

From TIP producing Ken Cameron’s Harvest, to Festival Players producing Michael Healy’s The Drawer Boy, there exists a trend in rural Canadian theatre of matching the type of theatre produced to the place in which it’s being produced, and the people for which it’s being produced. Both myself and audience members alike very much enjoy this trend, as it is a means of connecting to a theatre’s audience on a […]

The first glimpse that Kingston got of Beta’s Baby came one year ago, when creators Vanessa Smythe, Mitchell Cushman, and Nick Bottomley from the Toronto-based theatre company Outside the March held a free workshop as a part of the 2017 Kick & Push Festival. The goal was to devise an immersive theatre experience that paid homage to VHS rental stores. Smythe describes the show as a “love letter to the […]

I felt like I was witnessing a live version of a Black Mirror episode when sitting down to watch Flashing Lights in the Regina Rosen Auditorium in The Grand Theatre. This show is a  co-production of Ahuri Theatre & Bad New Days Theatre Company. Bad New Days is a company that concerns itself with creating and performing theatre of gesture that is contemporary and poetic. Let me break that down […]

If you haven’t already heard, it’s cool to be Asian. Crazy Rich Asians, featuring an exclusively Asian cast, is a blockbuster film that opens on August 15, and has already received a whopping 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Macklemore is making pho the trend for all of Seattle’s hip-hop scene and beyond. This second piece of information I got from creator Amanda Lin’s hilarious experimental dinner theatre piece titled Between […]

For a thespian, arguably one of the most exciting things about summertime is the opportunity to engage in some outdoor theatre in warm temperatures, hopefully under clear blue skies with a setting sun. Unfortunately, there are no such companies in Kingston that provide outdoor theatre (unlike Shakespeare in High Park in Toronto). Fortunately for us, however, the Kick & Push Festival arranged for Driftwood Theatre Company to engage audiences with […]

I feel very fortunate to have gotten to know Kim during my time studying at Queen’s University. I would like to share some of the memories that I have of her—not because I think my relationship with her was unique or special in any way, but exactly the opposite. The way she touched my life is so similar to how she touched the lives of many other students at Queen’s.

Blue Canoe’s production of Legally Blonde: The Musical is the second show of its summer season, and features a team comprised entirely of youth (and one dog).

Space Hippo, presented by Mochinosha & The Wishes Mystical Puppet Company, is an epic shadow puppet show that transcends borders both on earth and in space. Artists Daniel Wishes from Canada and Seri Yanai from Japan first met while studying puppetry in London. In a shadow puppet class, the two were tasked with creating solo shows—although they were each working on their own project, audiences couldn’t help but notice how […]

Waawaate Fobister gets straight to the point in his award-winning solo show ‘Agokwe’. There is an urgency to Agokwe—in the introduction, Nanabush states that “[Anishnaabe] culture is disappearing fast.” He doesn’t have time to let the audience draw their own conclusions.