Festival — Kingston Theatre Alliance

The Kick & Push Festival opens on a hopeful note with Pandora in the Box at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning. Transforming the Tett’s Rehearsal Hall into a maze of giant comic panels, this immersive work by cartoonist Lorena Torres Loaiza revisits the story of Pandora from Greek mythology to explore the nature of hope. Through a blend of real-world and virtual spaces, Pandora in the Box follows […]

Recently, I had a chance to sit down with performer Alex Boese and director Michael Catlin to chat about their upcoming play Birthmarks, which will be playing at Kingston Fringe. The play was written by Canadian playwright Alexandria Haber and follows Alex’s character, Kate. Birthmarks follows Kate as she tries to get over a tragic loss in her life while also trying to reconcile the relationship with her mother whom […]

The theatre is dark. A single video game controller sits under a spotlight in front of a projector screen. With no rules, and in no established order, audience members take turns leaving their seats and approaching the stage. One at a time, these brave players take control of asses.masses. Over several hours, a story of revolution, carnage, reincarnation, and collective care unfolds.  Presented by the Festival of Live Digital Arts […]

How would you feel if someone invaded your home—a place meant for comfort and security? Home is a solo performance starring Beau Dixon, performed at the Isabel Bader Centre and was a part of the Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA). In Home, Beau Dixon recalls his personal experience of a home invasion and how it changed him. He describes and recreates important moments of his life, but we are […]

Imagine being in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb dropped. Now imagine having no way to hear it. Scored in Silence is an excellent solo show, starring Deaf performer, Chisato Minamimura, and was performed as part of the Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA) at the Isabel Bader Centre. The performance recounts World War II and the effects of the atomic bomb on Japan, but more specifically how it affected the […]

“VOTES FOR WOMEN” read the posters, props, and pre-show backdrop at the Kingston Grand Theatre. The Lancashire Lass is a new musical by composer/lyricist/librettist Leslie Arden. Commissioned by the Dan School of Drama and Music in 2019 and workshopped in 2021 and 2022, the show had its official premiere this year in the Watershed Festival. Directed by Tim Fort, The Lancashire Lass recounts the women’s suffrage movement in 20th-century Britain […]

Leslie Arden is a renowned Canadian composer, lyricist, and librettist. In 2019, she was commissioned to write a new musical, The Lancashire Lass, for the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. First shown in an online preview in 2021, and then in concert in 2022, The Lancashire Lass is having its fully staged debut at this year’s Watershed Festival on May 26th and 27th at the Kingston […]

Let’s talk audio plays. There’s an obvious challenge here: Keep an audience engaged through only sound. Under-do it: you’ve lost their attention. Over-do it: tumultuous confusion. Finding that happy medium is really where a show sells itself. Now, one begs the question, does Shannon Kingston’s Garden of Edith find that sweet spot? …Yes. With beautiful precision. Presented by First Ditch Collective, the premiere of Garden of Edith begins with a […]

I was nervous when I strolled through City Park and I saw a haphazard setup of black boxes and forest-themed shower curtains. But, the Lakeside Players production of Robin Hood charmed me from start to finish. The well-known fairytale format was both honoured and upended for a modern audience. The writing spoke to the entire crowd, appealing to even the youngest. It was somehow modern and poetic; delectable to the […]

Who knew that ducks, friendship, and existentialism could coincide into a single theatre performance? These elements came together in a heartfelt conversation between two men in a recent performance of The Duck Variations. bEST Theatre Company’s The Duck Variations that played at the Grand Theatre as a part of the Kingston Fringe, produced by the Kick & Push Festival, was an existential and meandering conversation between two men on a […]

Return of the Megafauna created by Bad New Days is a physical theatre piece that was a part of the 2022 Kick and Push festival. The piece is contextualized through the company’s understanding of post-humanism and de-extinction, where the images of the future are utopic rather than dystopian. De-extinction is defined as the process of generating an organism that either resembles or is an extinct species.  I encountered the piece […]

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?”- Thomas Merton Presented at Theatre Kingston’s Fringe Festival, Color and Light’s Sailing to the Moon follows a young, wandering man named Tom (Thomas Cherney) who is trying to understand the value in pursuing monastic life in a forest. Injuring his foot on his journey to the monastery, […]