Interview — Kingston Theatre Alliance

After 180 years, you’d think A Christmas Carol would be as dead as a door-nail.  First published in 1843, A Christmas Carol is one of Charles Dickens’ best-known literary works. The story follows Ebenezer Scrooge as he’s visited by a series of ghosts and is transformed from a misanthropic miser into a gentler, more generous person. A Christmas Carol, which has remained in print for nearly two centuries, has also […]

Performance and XR (PXR) is a virtual reality conference hosted by Kingston’s Single Thread Theatre Company and Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre. Spanning provinces and platforms, the conference celebrates digital art making and innovation through XR (extended reality—virtual, augmented, and mixed reality). This week, I’m meeting with Amanda Lin—PXR producer and former editor of the KTA  blog—to learn more about the conference.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  […]

Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest nonprofit political theatre companies in the United States. Currently based in Vermont, Bread and Puppet is famous for its distinctive visual style and commitment to thought-provoking conversations—as well as its practice of sharing homemade sourdough bread with its audiences.  Bread and Puppet’s latest show, Inflammatory Earthling Rants With Help From Kropotkin, toured the northeastern United States this spring. As they gear […]

Chloë Whitehorn’s new play, Blood River, is set in a world where Roe v. Wade has been overturned and abortion is illegal. The play follows three women—a mother, a daughter, and a reproductive rights activist—as they navigate life where the lines between law and religion have become dangerously blurred.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity. So yes, okay. It is about abortion. But to call Blood River […]

Steampunk, solarpunk, cyberpunk, and sci-fi—when you think of live theatre, these probably aren’t the first words that come to mind. Well, tether your top hats and hold on to your cybernetic limbs: award-winning playwright Brandon Zang is on a science fiction kick, and he’s taking us with him. Zang is the 2023 winner of the Voaden Prize Playwriting Competition, a biennial award presented to Canadian playwrights by Queen’s University. This […]

What began as a mutual admiration between neighbours has blossomed into a collaboration across artistic disciplines. Spoken word poet and storyteller Billie Kearns and visual artist and educator Jill Glatt often run into each other on neighbourhood walks in the Inner Harbour. This fall, they’ve teamed up to present Storytelling and the Land: Who is Belle Island?, a public workshop in preparation for their upcoming exhibition at the Agnes Etherington […]

Like red-tinged leaves, flannel shirts, and droves of students lining up for lattes, Kingston WritersFest has been a fixture in the autumn landscape for as long as I’ve lived in the Limestone City. This week, I sat down with Artistic Director Aara Macauley to discuss this year’s theme—Unbound—and to learn how the festival, which runs from September 27th to October 1st, plans to connect Kingstonians with literature beyond the printed […]

If you’ve been to a handful of Kingston’s jazz nights, indie shows, musical theatre productions, or music festivals in the past decade, chances are you’ve heard Michael Broadhead on the upright or electric bass. In the wake of the Labour Day long weekend, I met up with Broadhead to talk about music, labour, and how performing artists can support one another in Kingston’s arts scene.  This interview has been edited […]

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 […]

Myths, musicals, Marvel movies, and the Mabinogion: Jesse Vriend is in pondering mode, and I’m along for the ride. It’s a Monday afternoon in early July and we’re sitting at Mallo, a café on Bathurst with ribbons of neon lights on the ceiling and a cute little cactus on the table.  I met Vriend in 2017 through a creative writing course at Queen’s. For a semester, I took great joy […]

On my first day in Toronto, I lugged my suitcase along Dundas and sat down at Oxtail Pho to chat with playwright and lyricist Nam Nguyen. Nguyen’s musical A Perfect Bowl of Pho (book and lyrics by Nguyen, music by Wilfred Moeschter) premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2022 and is coming to the Kick & Push Festival this August.  In the meantime, his new show CAEZUS (music by […]

Sarah Waisvisz is a playwright, dramaturge, multi-disciplinary performer, and professor at the Dan School of Drama and Music. Her plays include Monstrous, a solo script about the Afro-Caribbean-diaspora experience and mixed-race identity, and Heartlines, a two-act play about queer-Jewish activists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. I reached Waisvisz over Zoom recently for a short but lively conversation. We spoke about her upcoming play Double Helix, her work as a professor, […]