Theatre
Thriving in a digital life By Peter Paylor
Heading into last year, it seemed like Alexandra (Alex) Bell and Nathan Mahaffy were everywhere. Artists, musicians, improv comedians. Theatre creators both on stage and off. Co-producers, co-hosts, and performers with Night Kitchen Too, Belleville’s highly successful acoustic musical variety show.
The list of their accomplishments is long; their talents are vast; their momentum, it seemed, was unstoppable. The seventh year of Night Kitchen Too was chugging along nicely. They had opened for the Sadies in January with Bad Tractor, one of the region’s most popular live bands; Nathan on drums,
Raul Rincon
Alex on keyboard. The band was gigging most weekends. Grievous Angels, NDP Member of Parliament Charlie Angus’s band, had released their new album, Summer Before the Storm, with Nathan on drums. There was talk of a tour in the summer. They were regularly performing improv with the Improvmonauts, keeping audiences throughout the Quinte Region in stitches. They were into rehearsals for Mamma Mia! at the Belleville Theatre Guild where they both had parts in the pit band. “The outlook on the calendar for 2020 was looking very, very good,” says Mahaffy. “March 14, we played our last gig as Bad Tractor,” says Bell. “We played the Beaufort and it was eerie. We all showed up and we weren’t even sure we were going to play. That was on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon four of the five members of the band met because Billy MacInnis, Stompin’ Tom’s old fiddle player, was playing at the Old Church Theatre…the rest is literally history for the rest of the world. That was the day it all stopped…there were no more gigs, there haven’t been any gigs. And where are we now?” Where they are now is online. “There was a good long time when we were disconnected from a lot of social media,” says Mahaffy. “That wasn’t our game. We were always well-rooted in nature….and just sort of out of necessity started more recently branching out into that world and now here we are in 2021 where technology is how we get together and how we communicate.”
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