If you’ve been wondering why the Queen’s Entertainment Agency has kept a low profile this year, it’s because the service has been taking a quiet bow out.

The Plastic People Theatre Company is determined to go out with a bang—or two.
Punchline, the latest and last of the theatre company’s performances, pulls out all the stops, taking Plastic People’s traditional absurdism, social commentary and unapologetic vulgarity to new heights.
The play focuses on the exploits of two news anchors, each determined to fill the lone spot available at the news desk of NTV: National News Television.

For the filmmakers behind The Death of Indie Rock, life imitates art. Making the film, which tells the story of a small-town rock band looking to make it big, has been a three-year long lesson in the trials of independent movie-making for the group of Queen’s graduates who wrote, directed, produced and acted in the film.

Who: Jim Robinson, ArtSci ’08.
Medium: Comedy.
Where you’ve seen him: Time To Laugh’s Comedian Idol contest, Queen’s Players, Queen’s Varsity Improv, Eng Week’s Gong Show at Alfie’s.

A sweet indie release does not a full-time rock star make. Though they’re about to embark on their first cross-Canada tour with their newly released album We Are The Hunters on Out Of This Spark Records, the D’Urbervilles boys are keeping their day jobs for now, anyway.

For Kate and Anna McGarrigle music constitutes more a lifetime than a lifestyle. The sisters have been playing and making their original, bilingual folk-rock music ever since they began their band together in Montreal during the early 1970s.

This weekend, Kingston will encounter a loud-mouthed cabdriver, an indie-rock band trying to make it big and a teenager looking for her lost brother as the Kingston Canadian Film Festival unfolds throughout the city. With 19 feature films, 17 local shorts and a number of meet-and-greets and workshops with filmmakers, KingCan promises a busy weekend for film aficionados.

Most would agree that a story about the Spanish flu pandemic isn’t exactly the stuff comedy is made of. But Unity (1918), staged by Queen’s Drama Department and directed by Tim Fort, manages to inject both humour and hope into a grim story of the ravages of war and disease.

Most family road trips spell disaster. But if you’re Jill and Matt Barber, it means nothing but good times and music on the road. The siblings, who’ve established themselves and toured as musicians independently of each other over the past few years, are now teaming up for their first-ever combined cross-country tour.

Cabaret conjures up a hazy picture of a smoke-filled nightclub, a circus of performers oozing seduction and an enchanted and intoxicated audience. While its modern embodiment retains the sass, it ups the politics, setting the stage for a variety of acts from spoken word to tap-dancing to fire-spinning with playful gender-bending and sex worker-positive themes.

From speaking with him, it’s clear that for Jason Collett, home is where the heart is, and his heart lies with his friends. In fact, his integral role as a member of the Canadian rock supergroup Broken Social Scene rarely goes unmentioned in interviews—but that doesn’t seem to faze him.

If you saw Chris Koster’s latest album Sex, Love and Morality in a record store you probably wouldn’t think he was a Kingston musician. On the cover, Koster is clad in a black with a white tie, various instruments in hand. Behind him stands a band composed of sinister-looking wolves in tuxedos. His album cover seems like a very dramatic statement coming from a musician hailing from such a low-key city.

Memories can be tricky things. In All That Remains, the exhibit on display at the Union Gallery, memories are represented through the paintings and mixed media works of three Queen’s BFA students.

Dementia, unfulfilled potential and emotionally abusive fathers don’t quite scream ‘laugh track’ to most people. The Savages, a dark new “comedy” by writer and director Tamara Jenkins doesn’t quite make the jump from bleak, truthful story to wry, witty statement about life, although it does portray the heartbreak of caring for a dying family member with poignancy and realism.

With red and pink seemingly permeating the atmosphere, Valentine’s Day garners mixed reactions among the love struck, lovelorn and love-haters of the world. The day to celebrate love can ironically spark a lot of anti-love, or rather anti-Valentine, sentiment. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day’s approach, Love me! Or leave me alone is a show exploring contemporary treatment of the age-old holiday.

What began as a night of frantically scoping out appelaing pieces of art turned into a lesson in artistic subjectivity.

For artists in the Queen’s community, there’s not such thing as over-exposure, and Neshka Kus and Avneet Toor are on a mission to put student art in the spotlight.
Kus and Toor, both ArtSci ’08, are co-chairs of Exposure, an art festival run through the AMS’s Campus Activities Commission. They were hired last March and began planning for this year’s festival last May.

The only element linking together this year’s short plays in Vogt B is madness.
The student-run series, performed in the Vogt Theatre in Carruthers Hall, offers three one-act plays on this slot’s bill. Stringing together a play about a lonely housewife quelling her despair with gin, a dark twist on reality where humans are pets looked after by a pig and a segment about a near-suicidal young man stumbling upon his guardian angel, Vogt B’s plays peel away layers of sanity and offers insights into downward mental spirals—albeit some more successfully than others.

Not many theatrical performances can say they have something for almost everyone, but Thread is no ordinary theatre production.