Holly Hebert — Kingston Theatre Alliance

Queen’s Theatre Troupe (QTT) is back at it again, this time with their first show of 2025. Bringing audiences into the fantastical dressing room of Sky Gilbert’s Drag Queens on Trial, QTT welcomes the show to Convocation Hall. Directed by Linden Imeson Jorna, the production bleeds comedy and melodrama, while also tackling some serious social issues. I was lucky enough to recently sit down with Jorna and chat about the […]

A new Kingston theatre company is taking on an old classic. To be exact, Two Rabbits One Hat is bringing Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Union Gallery. Playing the notorious title character is Jake Henderson, an actor, researcher, and fourth-year student at Queen’s University. Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Henderson to speak all about the illustrious Macbeth.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Getting […]

Student-run theatre strikes again! This January, Queen’s Musical Theatre (QMT) is bringing the renowned Sunday in the Park with George—music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by James Lapine—to Kingston. With over 100 folks involved, the organization has been working for many months on bringing this partially immersive (more on that later) musical to the stage. Director Rachel Rusonik was kind enough to sit down with me during the ever-busy […]

This December, The Spire is welcoming multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, and multi-Joan. Living Edge Collective is bringing to the stage a workshop presentation of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. The company strives to engage artists in ecological collaboration, bringing beautiful intention into their work.  Living Edge situates Saint Joan “in this sanctuary of echo and sonic revelry, our production explores the idea of seven different Joans meeting to characterize the many architects […]

The classic saying is, “The show must go on!” Well, so must the review… sort of.  With our small team at the KTA, unfortunately when one of us is struck with sickness, there’s a bit of reworking to be done. This was the case last week, just as we were about to review Theatre Kingston’s production of Boy Beatle. However, we luckily managed to work out a short interview through […]

The tenth day of the tenth month. What better time to read about the Kick & Push Festival’s tenth season?  Although summer may be long over by now, the KTA has just finished wrapping up the necessary paperwork that must come with the annual Kick & Push Festival. As my colleague and Artistic Producer of the Kick & Push Liam Karry recently closed the books on this year’s busy run, […]

Participating and playing in this year’s WritersFest is Jeff McGilton, a multi-faceted artist who Kingston has the pleasure of engaging this week as he and Mariah (Mo) Horner will be facilitating a workshop in the September festival titled Participatory Play. Earlier this year, Horner and Jenn Stephenson published Play: Dramaturgies of Participation and the workshop—a TeensWrite Studio event—will guide teens through concepts in the book, mainly focussing on participatory theatre. […]

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 […]

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 […]

A group of young artists puts on a musical about young artists in a festival for young artists. Blue Canoe Productions and the 2024 Juvenis Festival present Rent, directed by Dylan Chenier.  Jonathan Larson’s Rent, loosely based on Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, tells the story of young artists as they traverse through gentrification, love, and the HIV and AIDS epidemic present in the 80s and 90s. With New York City […]