Kingston Theatre Alliance — Kingston Theatre Alliance

Given the chance to create utopia, what would it look like? Would it be possible? And would we even want to? Fusing strategic gameplay with a theatrical narrative, the Vancouver/Toronto-based company Re:Current Theatre has created an experience that is as immersive as it is interactive.

The Harrowing of Brimstone McReedy welcomes you into the room with a few carnival games—one in particular, ‘fast and loose,’ asks audience members to make bets on a piece of rope. Pick a side, any side, and if the knot tightens around your finger, you win. If you’re not caught, you lose. This sets the tone straight away for the show about to be played: either you’re caught, or you […]

When you walk into Stupidhead! at the Central Public Library, the floor is covered in zig-zags of candy-coloured tape that suggest—thanks to a paper mâché brain that gets wheeled out when the show begins—the wavelengths of the brain.

The first glimpse that Kingston got of Beta’s Baby came one year ago, when creators Vanessa Smythe, Mitchell Cushman, and Nick Bottomley from the Toronto-based theatre company Outside the March held a free workshop as a part of the 2017 Kick & Push Festival. The goal was to devise an immersive theatre experience that paid homage to VHS rental stores. Smythe describes the show as a “love letter to the […]

I felt like I was witnessing a live version of a Black Mirror episode when sitting down to watch Flashing Lights in the Regina Rosen Auditorium in The Grand Theatre. This show is a  co-production of Ahuri Theatre & Bad New Days Theatre Company. Bad New Days is a company that concerns itself with creating and performing theatre of gesture that is contemporary and poetic. Let me break that down […]

For a thespian, arguably one of the most exciting things about summertime is the opportunity to engage in some outdoor theatre in warm temperatures, hopefully under clear blue skies with a setting sun. Unfortunately, there are no such companies in Kingston that provide outdoor theatre (unlike Shakespeare in High Park in Toronto). Fortunately for us, however, the Kick & Push Festival arranged for Driftwood Theatre Company to engage audiences with […]

Space Hippo, presented by Mochinosha & The Wishes Mystical Puppet Company, is an epic shadow puppet show that transcends borders both on earth and in space. Artists Daniel Wishes from Canada and Seri Yanai from Japan first met while studying puppetry in London. In a shadow puppet class, the two were tasked with creating solo shows—although they were each working on their own project, audiences couldn’t help but notice how […]

Waawaate Fobister gets straight to the point in his award-winning solo show ‘Agokwe’. There is an urgency to Agokwe—in the introduction, Nanabush states that “[Anishnaabe] culture is disappearing fast.” He doesn’t have time to let the audience draw their own conclusions.

BFFs is a new 45-minute mini-musical by Bad Dress Productions that follows the reunion of 2 university friends in their university city of Montreal (they both went to McGill) after years of “adulting”, consequently not being able to see another for quite a long time. They are, however, superbly happy to see one another when they both arrive at the small Airbnb they rented for the weekend. And, judging by the contents of the luggage each character brings, the audience is able to discern what these characters might be like.

If you’re in search for a scary story to tell, looking at real life events may be a good place to start. Tyler Mathews is a Kingston playwright who stumbled upon the story of American serial killer Albert Fish (or The Boogeyman as he was sometimes known), and latched onto the story due to his interest in exploring the darkest human impulses.

As 1 of 7 shows part of The Kick & Push Festival (on from July 19 to August 12 in the Downtown Kingston Area), The Flick cast and crew were in tech mode when I went – in the Roxy Theatre of the Screening Room.

There’s something so cathartic about watching a play about revenge—maybe it’s something to do with how we want to believe the world is just, and that evil actions have consequences.