Just as wines have years of exceptional harvest, theater can also produce a bounty of smash hits within a single calendar rotation. For Canada, that year was 2010, when two of the country’s biggest theatrical successes hit the stage, one a musical born of history and the other a hyperlocal story about family.
Houston has already been gifted with a stellar production of the Tony-winning Come From Away, Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s musical about what happened post-9/11 when hundreds of international planes were forced to land in small-town Newfoundland. Now, Houstonians can see the other hit from the north, Ins Choi’s comedy Kim’s Convenience, an immigrant story of struggle, hard work, generation clashes, forgiveness and family bonds.
While Kim’s wasn’t lauded with a Tony, its success is notable. What started as a self-produced semi-autobiographical Fringe-Fest story developed into a full-fledged play, causing bidding wars in the Toronto theater landscape for the right to produce the show. What followed was a wildly successful national Canadian tour, productions Off-Broadway/in London, and a five-season hit Canadian national television show picked up by Netflix in 2018.
So yeah, Kim’s is a big deal.
Especially for this Canadian/now Houstonian critic who has seen, reviewed and unabashedly adored the show on multiple occasions.
Well, unabashedly adored until now.
The play, directed by Andrew Ruthven, centers on a Korean-owned convenience store in a downtown Toronto neighborhood in the early throes of gentrification. Appa (Johny Barton), the patriarch/owner of the store, is visited by a real estate agent offering him a large sum of money to sell the space. Condos are going up, Walmart is coming in, real estate is at a premium in this developing area.
Appa (father in Korean) refuses, citing his store’s importance to the community and hoping instead that his 30-year-old daughter Janet, who still lives above the store with her parents, will take over.
Janet (Sethe Nguyen) wants none of it. Instead, she’s focused on her burgeoning career as a photographer. Besides, she’s already put in her time helping at the store, especially since her older brother Jung’s falling out with his father and disappearance from the family.
Meanwhile, Janet’s mother (Minsook Kim), Umma (mother in Korean), regularly meets with Jung (Jack Stansbury), trying to teach him about the importance of family sacrifice and hoping to mend familial fences.
It’s a simple story that relies on one thing to make the comedy and ultimate empathy work – the oversized charisma of Appa.
In the right circumstances, Choi’s script creates a surprisingly nuanced yet epically larger-than-life comedic character. Part Korean Archie Bunker, part woke/assimilated cool new Canadian, Appa is the perfect study in how to craft a hot-blooded, unapologetically accented, situationally racist/chauvinistic yet generationally progressive and 100 percent bombastic leading man who is beloved/respected by the audience despite his failings. We’re meant to laugh with and most certainly at him.
Whether he’s explaining his twisted theory of which types of races, genders and sexualities “steal or no steal from store,” ranting about illegally parked Japanese cars, obnoxiously going head-to-head with Janet and cheekily interacting with the customers that frequent his store, Appa should be a constant, deliriously exhausting streak of hilarity.
So, what happens when Appa doesn’t get the laughs needed to carry the show?
Whether it was opening night nerves or Ruthven’s direction, Barton’s Appa held punches from the start. Instead of free-falling into the fun, Appa showed up far too laid-back and hesitant to make the comedic timing work.
Barton can yell, but it’s not volume we need; it’s take hold of the stage playfulness. That wink showing us that Appa is having a laugh at his own outsized reaction even as he can’t help his drama kingness. Everything here feels inelastic, stymied and serious.
With no one to riff off, Nguyen’s Janet also suffers.
Unlike the TV show, where Choi’s characters become more fully developed, Janet’s main role in the play is to be exasperated by Appa. But if we aren’t laughing at him, we certainly don’t have patience for her huffing and puffing. Nor do we feel her coexisting frustration/bond with a father she loves and resents.
Much of the play is aggressive father-daughter banter. It should be duck-for-cover warfare as they bait, attack and tease. Again, timing is the undoing here, and it feels more like a dead-air pickleball game than a roaring grand slam match.
But the real casualty when it comes to timing in this production lies with Kim’s Umma—for her English scenes, that is.
It should be noted that all dialogue between Umma and Appa is spoken in Korean. We Anglo-Americans may not get every word, but we understand enough. It is joyous to hear the pair communicate as they would together, even if emotion seems lost in these scenes.
However, apart from these moments, Kim’s Umma seems to be on a several-second delay when delivering English dialogue in her scenes with her son Jung. It’s as if she’s searching for every line and struggling to affect a believable accent.
It screeches the drama to an uncomfortable, halting stop that never quite recovers, despite Stansbury’s strong performance as a kid disappointed with how his life has turned out.
The true disappointment, however, is that the production’s failings undermine the show’s overall purpose.
The brilliance in Choi’s script is that it’s meant to allow the audience equal empathy for both the strong-willed Appa and Janet and later as things unfold, for Umma and Jung.
We may not be Korean, or have parents who ran a corner store and we might not have immigrant experience in our upbringing. But we do understand family.
Kim’s is a story that examines parental expectations and generational differences and how, ultimately, love, when finally expressed, can bridge the divide.
And, if you’ll permit a little hometown patriotism, the show is truly a Toronto/Canadian innovation.
Diverse without lecture, white people absent because why would this story need them, poking fun at the ethnicity of the imperfect leading man. The great Canadian mosaic as opposed to the American melting pot.
Is it a little outdated for our 2025 sensitives? Hell yes. Not all the woke jokes pass muster 15 years later. The script’s Korean/Black divide dynamic feels past due/out of touch. The underwriting of the female characters echoes.
And still.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia for the exceptional Kim’s productions past experienced or the shadows of the even better TV show, but I feel with the right hand this is a show that can still stick the landing. Just not this time, I’m afraid.
Kim’s Convenience continues through June 15 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays at Main Street Theater – Rice Village, 2540 Times Boulevard. For more information, call 713-524-6706. $40-$63.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
