Darby Huk — Kingston Theatre Alliance

This past winter came early, hit hard, and—quite frankly—overstayed its welcome. It clung to Kingston’s limestone buildings with both hands before the sun managed to thaw the city. As the tulips gradually emerged and newborn goslings paddled around the inner harbor, Princess Street restaurants traded in their snow shovels and sidewalk salt for parasols and patios. Kingston welcomed this much-anticipated seasonal change the best way it knows how: with music.  […]

This year at Thousand Islands Playhouse, the Springer Theatre’s first show of the season is Sugar Road, written by Kristen Da Silva and directed by Sheila McCarthy. Like the formulaic Hallmark movies that are beloved around the holiday season, Sugar Road follows a structure that will be as familiar to most audiences as the back of their own hands: two sentimental protagonists, two comedic side characters, enough miscommunication to push […]

How do you review a dream? When you blearily blink back into wakefulness, is it better to critically engage with your slumbering mind through a psychoanalytical Freudian lens, or that of an English major attempting to establish a story structure? Perhaps a bit of both, with a healthy amount of neither.  James Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegans Wake reads like a dream, radical and baffling to the point where nearly a […]

With Women of the Fur Trade, Thousand Islands Playhouse opens its 2026 season with a fine-tuned balance of biting satire and roaring comedy. Directed by Keith Barker alongside Apprentice Director Stephanie Fung and written by Frances Koncan, the play focuses on three women who sit trapped together in a frontier fort: Marie-Angelique (Danelle Charette), a Métis idealist who fangirls over Louis Riel; Cecilia (Alison Beckwith), a British settler concerned for […]

Content Warning: ‘Carrie’ deals with child abuse, violence, murder, and bullying. Although this review does not discuss these topics in depth, they are general themes in the performance.

“Careful, it’s sharp!” comes the warning from one of Deathtrap’s five characters, and while it’s meant to caution against the cutting steel of a weapon, the descriptor could just as easily apply to the play itself.  Deathtrap, a 1978 play written by Ira Levin, is Queen’s Theatre Troupe (QTT)’s latest production. Co-directed by Myra Chiu and Alfonsina, the dark comedy contains multiple twists and turns that are just as likely […]

The play revolves around the experiences of Janey Quinn, played by Elizabeth Morris, and Fiona Conlon, played by Hayley Hudson, who are two Deaf actors working as extras on a film taking place in Potato-Famine-era Ireland, but shot in Frontenac County. The third and final actress on stage is Lauren Lafayette Brooks, who plays multiple characters: Aisling, the film’s frustrated First Assistant Director (AD); Nicola, the movie’s star; and Sean, Janey’s unhoused and drug-addicted cousin. With this small cast of characters, the three actors lead the audience through the hurdles Deaf actors are forced to navigate to pursue their dreams. 

When I call David Suzuki on Monday morning, he is in Guelph, having performed What You Won’t Do For Love at the River Run Centre the evening before. Suzuki is turning 90 in May, but his voice carries the same calm timbre it did when he hosted Quirks and Quarks for CBC Radio back in 1975. If I close my eyes, I can pretend I’m back in my childhood home and […]

In the quiet darkness of a theatre before the stage lights go on, the squeaky wheels of an IV pole are our first introduction to Dr. Vivian Bearing. “It’s not my intention to give away the plot,” she tells the audience in an opening monologue that immediately breaks the fourth wall, “but I think I die at the end.”  W;t, written by Margaret Edson and directed by Martha Bailey, is […]