News & Reviews — Kingston Theatre Alliance

“VOTES FOR WOMEN” read the posters, props, and pre-show backdrop at the Kingston Grand Theatre. The Lancashire Lass is a new musical by composer/lyricist/librettist Leslie Arden. Commissioned by the Dan School of Drama and Music in 2019 and workshopped in 2021 and 2022, the show had its official premiere this year in the Watershed Festival. Directed by Tim Fort, The Lancashire Lass recounts the women’s suffrage movement in 20th-century Britain […]

“All families are dysfunctional,” proclaims the poster for Assumption: a Comedy. “Some are just better at hiding it.”  Assumption is a new play co-written by Jo McAlpine, Christie Jefferson, Cathy LeSage, and Anna Sudac. Presented by the Not So Amateur Amateurs and directed by Anna Sudac, this play was brought to life under a unique set of circumstances. Starting with a spontaneous idea by McAlpine and Jefferson to co-write a […]

At Hilda’s house, nobody uses the front door. Set in 1956, Hilda’s Yard follows an afternoon of mild chaos as empty nesters Hilda and Sam Fluck find their adult children hopping the fence in an unannounced—and uninvited—return home. Jokes are made, relatives are nagged, and heartfelt conversations are had. Hilda’s Yard, a comedy by Norm Foster, premiered in New Brunswick in 2012. This month, it appears at Kingston’s Domino Theatre […]

This review mentions sexual violence. You can tell a show is going to be a riot when the venue posts a list of what not to bring. If you’re going to the Brockville Arts Centre this weekend, their website has a long catalogue of forbidden items, including rice, dry toast, toilet paper, open flames, confetti, and supersoakers. If this list sounds familiar, you might already be humming the “Time Warp.” […]

I have a terrible secret: until Friday night, I had never seen Funny Girl. Not the show, not the movie. I’d never even borrowed the CD from the library, which I did with every other cast album I could get my hands on as a show tune-saturated tween. I have a foggy middle school recollection of hearing Lea Michele sing “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in Glee, but that’s it. […]

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Smoky, sensual, and unsettling—welcome to Cabaret. This weekend, St. Lawrence College, showcasing students from the Music Theatre Performance program, presents the classic musical in all its doomed, debauched glory. Set in interwar Berlin, Joe Masteroff’s Cabaret (music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb) depicts the insidious creep of fascism into everyday life. Based on the play by John Van Drulen, which in turn is based on the work […]

What is the Critic Looking For? What a loaded question! Let me ask you one. What makes great theatre? I’ll even tell you the answer.  Artists.  You want artists to be there. Artists, technicians, administrators, engineers, carpenters, bartenders, ushers, whatever their job title, you want these masters of their craft there. You want them in there doing what they love to do; making theatre happen. Ideally, you’ll find artists who […]

An immersive student production transforms the Isabel Bader Centre’s studio theatre into a site of divine reckoning. Branden Jacob-Jenkins’ Everybody is a contemporary adaptation of the 15th-century morality play Everyman. A popular genre in medieval and early Tudor theatre, morality plays typically feature personifications of abstract concepts alongside angels, demons, and an ordinary human protagonist. In Everyman, one man—representing all of humanity—goes on an allegorical journey through the afterlife, addressing […]

The perennial City of Wine offers its first full bloom with Harmonia, a tale of forbidden love between a goddess and a mortal. Harmonia is the first in the nine-play cycle by local playwright Ned Dickens, which the Grapevine Theatre Project plans to produce as a series over the next five years. After an enormous effort by a network of over 300 theatre lovers, Harmonia is the magnificent fruit of […]

1922: Catherine, Frances, Charlotte, and Pearl are the four shining faces of the factory workers at the Radium Dial Company. For eight hours a day, they paint tiny numbers on pocket watch after pocket watch, laughing and talking as they dip their brushes in radium-laced paint.  When she first joins the company, Catherine is put off by her coworkers’ habit of licking their brushes to make the ends pointy, but […]

It’s a classic clash of generations: Canadian high school grad Tanya arrives in Ireland and is flabbergasted by her grandmother’s seemingly backwards lifestyle. Mary, Tanya’s Nan, is set in her ways— she prefers to cover the electric stovetop with a tablecloth and cook her meals on a fire, so-called progress be damned. Over a long summer filled with uphill bike rides, intercultural misadventures, and cups of tea with a mysterious […]