Review — Kingston Theatre Alliance

The cardinal rules of theatre: sit still, don’t chitchat, and make sure your phone is on silent and put away. Adrienne Wong chooses to challenge these conventions, exploring our relationships with our devices through audience participation. 

The 2024 Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), produced by SpiderWebShowPerformance, took place from June 13-15. In this section (catch Part One here!), I take a deep dive into SmartSmart, an interactive performance by Adrienne Wong that was staged at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. In my previous review of FOLDA 2024, I mentioned that the festival promotes innovation, creativity, and reflection, and SmartSmart very much embodies these values.

Where can you catch a groovy concert, talk to a multimedia AI interface, and take in a 360-degree film in a dome, all in one weekend? FOLDA, of course!  The Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), produced by SpiderWebShowPerformance, promotes live digital art with the hopes of empowering communities, creating connections, and inspiring critique. The 2024 festival took place from June 13-15, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity […]

It’s family drama and first crushes, with a side of baseball. Directed by Penny Nash and staged by Domino Theatre, Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982) is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy. It centres around the Jerome family through the perspective of the youngest son, fifteen year-old Eugene Morris Jerome (William Mitchell). Living in Brooklyn, the Jewish-Polish immigrant family experience personal hardships and conflict under the threat of impending war. Meanwhile, […]

On the day of her mother’s wake, Amelia finds herself at a loss for what to wear. It doesn’t help that her dead mum keeps appearing in her childhood bedroom, all smiles and chatter.  Written by Chloe Whitehorn and directed by Will Britton, Dressing Amelia unpacks mother-daughter baggage through quippy digs, impassioned speeches, and the ever-tantalizing promise that dirty laundry will be aired. A little bit soap opera, a little […]

The night Menopause The Musical 2: Cruising Through ‘The Change’ came to Kingston, my mother was in town, so naturally I invited her along as a guest expert.  She’d seen the original Menopause The Musical on tour several years ago and hadn’t enjoyed it much, offering such sizzling critiques as “I think there’s a certain type of ‘hilarious’ humour that I don’t like,” and “I hate the Beach Boys.” Ever […]

It’s tough being a drama critic at the best of times. For Brooklyn-based theatre journalist Mortimer Brewster (Danny Lalonde), the drama is seeping into his home life at a worrying pace.  Mortimer has just promised to marry his long-term girlfriend, Elaine (Wendy Stephen), when a chance peek into his aunts’ window seat reveals that life in the Brewster household is not all as it seems. Aunt Abby (Charlene Wehlau) and […]

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 […]

“I’ve seen tears in men’s eyes… It was a very emotional time when a man came in and went up to the counter.”  -Relief worker in Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years: 1929-1939. Ten Lost Years is a play based on the 1973 book of the same name by Barry Broadfoot playing at Domino Theatre this spring. Written by Cedric Smith, George Luscombe, and Jack Winter, and directed by Martha Bailey, […]

Nine is a famous Broadway musical brought to life by the students of St. Lawrence College’s Music Theatre – Performance program. It played at the Thousand Islands Playhouse this past weekend and was directed by Alexandra Herzog. With music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and book by Arthur Kopit, the story based on the 1963 film 8½  follows Italian Film Director Guido Contini (Felipe De Brito) as he tries to […]

Since my first dreary days as an ArtSci frosh, getting stuck in a crowd of Queen’s students has been a surefire way to bring out my inner Wednesday Addams. As I stood in the Rotunda Theatre’s packed lobby on Thursday evening, noisy whirls of preview-night chatter ricocheting in my ears, I felt a distinct urge to crawl deeper into my own skin. When I realized my arms were crossed and […]

You’ve heard of iPhone, iPod, iPad, but what about iWorld?  Kingston Meistersingers’ production of We Will Rock You!, directed by Rachael McDonald, is a jukebox musical with songs by Queen and book by Ben Elton. Bringing a collection of rock hits to Domino Theatre’s stage, the show flashes forward hundreds of years into the future: the world is run by Globalsoft, a music corporation that has destroyed and banned all […]

Audiences are wondering if all the world’s a billboard as the latest trend in corporate sponsorship emerges in Kingston’s theatre scene. Previously known as Domino Theatre, the new Domino’s Pizza Theatre will soon follow the lead of Slush Puppie Place (formerly Leon’s Centre) in accepting commercial dough.  Rising costs of venue upkeep and drastic cuts to arts funding have been cited as motivators for more local organizations to turn to […]