Kick & Push Festival — Kingston Theatre Alliance

On Tuesday, August 15th I was invited to see the first viewing of the Cedar Island Residency performance taking place the following day. I was not told much about the performance, giving me a feeling of nervous excitement. This is the first performance I have ever attended where I did not have much information about it beforehand. The only thing I was told was to meet at the Kingston Marina […]

Feeling curious about seeing a mime roam the ins and outs of a giant translucent bubble? See La Bulle in Kingston this weekend.  La Bulle is a mime show produced by CORPUS Dance Projects and is being presented at the Kick & Push Festival by the Kingston Theatre Alliance and Le Centre Culturel Frontenac.  The show follows a lonely mime, Pierrot (David Danzon / Guy Marsan; the performer at the […]

A deliciously funny show. A Perfect Bowl of Pho is a meta-musical created and written by Nam Nguyen, music composed by Wilfred Moeschter, and directed by Steven Hao. The story is centered around a procrastinating University of Toronto student, Nam, performed by Chris Vergara. The story follows Nam as he struggles to write a musical about… I think you guessed it… Pho.  A meta-musical is a play within a play. […]

A tragic, humorous, and thought provoking play; gripping attention from the very beginning. Birthmarks is a bittersweet one woman show that follows Kate. As a young woman recounting her life, she is trying to move on from the sudden death of her infant child while also coming to terms with her mother’s place in her life after abandoning her as a kid. Alex Boese is fantastic as the one and […]

So, you’re 50 years old and sobbing under a desk at work. Where do you go from here? If you’re Sandra Banman, you’ll crawl out and craft a beautiful memoir. Presented with gentle wit and a generous spirit, Menno-Morphosis is a one-woman show written and performed by Banman and directed by Catherine Hume. It takes a lot to grow up and out of a strict Mennonite family in Manitoba. Banman […]

Kingston’s underground world of goblins and ghouls is home to more monsters than usual this week. Descend into the Kingston Gaming Nexus, if you dare, and follow the eerie carnival noises through a maze of board games to the back of the basement store. Here, you’ll find an unusual sight: Eldritch Theatre has set up shop, and Doctor Pretorious Wuthergloom (Eric Woolfe) is prepared to entertain and educate the masses […]

If you saw a man with a bandaged head carrying a CD player as he dashed down Princess Street this week, don’t worry—it was no one.  By no one, I mean it was Outheis. From Barrie, Ontario, Talk Is Free Theatre (TIFT) presents Outheis, a multi-site immersive theatre experience at the Kingston Grand Theatre. Conceived and directed by Griffin Hewitt, this show features captivating performances by Troy Adams, Taylor Garwood, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]