News & Reviews — Kingston Theatre Alliance

Following the successful run of A Comedy of Tenors, Domino Theatre is back with the second instalment of their season: The Mouse House, a thrilling and timely play by Canadian playwright Robert Ainsworth.

Theatre Kingston has just announced their season for 2018/19! On the roster for this season are 2 plays: The Butcher by Nicolas Billon, and What a Young Wife Ought to Know by Hannah Moscovitch. Both playwrights are Canadian. The Butcher, playing in the Baby Grand Theatre from October 26 – November 11, explores themes pertaining to victimhood in an elusive judicial system. “A mysterious old man is dropped off at a police […]

Theatre in Picton, Ontario, audiences can watch Mimi (played by Christy Bruce) go on a blind date, and even have the chance to participate in the date. Blind Date is part improv, part clowning, part miming, and makes for a fun night out for audience members of all kinds.

Two Filipina nurses walk into Arborfield Memorial Hospital. You won’t believe what happens next! Marie Beath Badian was inspired to write Prairie Nurse by real people, including her mom, a nurse who immigrated from the Philippines to Canada, Penny, another Filipina nurse, and Pat Hackett, a candy striper at the hospital. Prairie Nurse is bright, energetic, and bears all the markers of a TV sit-com—wild misunderstandings, over the top characters, […]

A new Canadian farce! Playing in the Springer Theatre until August 18, The Canadian by this new whimsical physical comedy world premiered by Thousand Islands Playhouse – takes the audience through a whirlwind of events so calculated and carefully timed that they could all crumbling down upon an accidental early entrance or line fumble. Director Rob Kempson reflects upon this in his Director’s Note, equating a farce to a “complex […]

Upon entering the Firehall theatre, there was a sense of familiarity. The stage was dressed as a pub, complete with TV screens playing soccer games (or, since Midsummer is set in Edinburgh, “football” games) and the sound of chatter and dishes that blended smoothly into the sound of the audience talking amongst themselves. In his director’s note, Brett Christopher refers to the universality of the story that is about to […]

From TIP producing Ken Cameron’s Harvest, to Festival Players producing Michael Healy’s The Drawer Boy, there exists a trend in rural Canadian theatre of matching the type of theatre produced to the place in which it’s being produced, and the people for which it’s being produced. Both myself and audience members alike very much enjoy this trend, as it is a means of connecting to a theatre’s audience on a […]

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 […]

If you haven’t already heard, it’s cool to be Asian. Crazy Rich Asians, featuring an exclusively Asian cast, is a blockbuster film that opens on August 15, and has already received a whopping 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Macklemore is making pho the trend for all of Seattle’s hip-hop scene and beyond. This second piece of information I got from creator Amanda Lin’s hilarious experimental dinner theatre piece titled Between […]

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 […]

I feel very fortunate to have gotten to know Kim during my time studying at Queen’s University. I would like to share some of the memories that I have of her—not because I think my relationship with her was unique or special in any way, but exactly the opposite. The way she touched my life is so similar to how she touched the lives of many other students at Queen’s.