Ben Sterlin — Kingston Theatre Alliance

In his song “We All Try”, the brilliant songwriter Frank Ocean echoes the sentiment, “you must believe in something”, because it is this belief in something that drives our need to try.

Strap yourselves in for a wild ride at Butcher by Nicolas Billon, the fall installment of Theatre Kingston’s 2018/2019 season. This strong and dedicated team of Canadian theatre artists, guided by seasoned director Kathryn MacKay, succeed in bringing to life this complex narrative and the even more complex themes that come along with it.  The first thing audiences see when walking into the alley space is Steve Lucas’s meticulously designed […]

Theatre Kingston has just announced their season for 2018/19! On the roster for this season are 2 plays: The Butcher by Nicolas Billon, and What a Young Wife Ought to Know by Hannah Moscovitch. Both playwrights are Canadian. The Butcher, playing in the Baby Grand Theatre from October 26 – November 11, explores themes pertaining to victimhood in an elusive judicial system. “A mysterious old man is dropped off at a police […]

Danika Lochhead (pronounced Lock-heed) plays a crucial role in fostering opportunities for theatre creation and appreciation in Kingston about which not nearly enough theatre practitioners in the community know.

Rosemary Doyle, the incoming Artistic Director of Theatre Kingston, invited me into her office – which she recently reconfigured to make it more inviting to passersby – for this interview.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

On July 6 & 7, Kingston’s Domino Theatre assembled community theatregoers and lovers for back-to-back evenings of showcasing exclusively local content at their annual One-Act Play Festival. The winning play of the festival is granted the Ken Weston Award for Best Original Script, and the opportunity to represent Domino Theatre at the Eastern Ontario Drama League (EODL) One-Act Festival that is to occur this November 9-11 at Domino Theatre.

BFFs is a new 45-minute mini-musical by Bad Dress Productions that follows the reunion of 2 university friends in their university city of Montreal (they both went to McGill) after years of “adulting”, consequently not being able to see another for quite a long time. They are, however, superbly happy to see one another when they both arrive at the small Airbnb they rented for the weekend. And, judging by the contents of the luggage each character brings, the audience is able to discern what these characters might be like.

As 1 of 7 shows part of The Kick & Push Festival (on from July 19 to August 12 in the Downtown Kingston Area), The Flick cast and crew were in tech mode when I went – in the Roxy Theatre of the Screening Room.