Every Straight Street event is designed and owned, end to end, by one of our senior AV producers.
Here’s who they are — and the crew who make the show happen.
Keith Kissner - Founder & Senior AV Producer (in the industry since 1976)
Keith designs the technical side of your event — sound, video, lighting, staging — and puts the right people on it. He has been doing this since 1976, and founded Straight Street in 1997 to be the AV partner he thought the industry was missing.
Read More
He started with a stage lighting company called Score Systems, grew it over nearly twenty years into a touring supplier whose equipment and crews travelled with productions across Canada and the United States, and sold it to Christie Lites in 1995. He came back two years later because of something he had watched from the supply side: event hosts treated as transactions by companies whose interest ended when the truck left the shop. The name comes from the Street Called Straight in Damascus, and it set the standard for the business — deal straight, speak plainly, help people see what they are buying.
The night that explains why he still does this was a themed awards dinner at Bingeman Park in Kitchener, built around Phantom of the Opera. More than eighty small chandeliers hung around the perimeter of the ballroom and one very large one, rented from the prop house at the Stratford Festival, hung over the centre. Four dry ice machines sat ready. When the doors opened, three feet of low fog rolled out across the floor, four lights chased around the big chandelier so it appeared to shake, and the theme came up loud. The audience gasped on the way in. In Keith’s words: that’s why I do what I do.
The other half of the job is the part nobody sees. In 2001, the Central Ontario Ride for Sight brought 10,000 motorcyclists and two days of bands to a site with a long history of noise complaints from the neighbours. Keith went in ahead of the event and reconfigured how the sound carried across the property. Over the whole weekend, not one complaint.
What he wants clients to know is simpler than most of the technical talk they’ll hear: ask what isn’t in the number. Most AV surprises aren’t equipment failures. They’re line items nobody mentioned until the invoice.
Before he gives the cue to go ahead, he checks that every person is in place. Nothing starts until they are.
Away from the venues, Keith and his partner take day trips wherever the mood points them. He was a violinist most of his life and still enjoys music of every kind.
Mike Greco — Senior AV Producer (in the industry since 1986)
Mike turns the plan on paper into the room your guests walk into, and owns the technical side of your event so you don’t have to. He has been in the industry since 1986.
Read More
He came to it by accident. A well-known Toronto band lost their lighting director the night of a show, and Mike — who had never operated a console — stepped in to help friends out of a jam. That night lit something up: “it sparked a confidence and an unknown-something in me as a creative person,” he says, and he’s spent every year since learning the craft in all its facets.
What he loves is the moment just before doors — when an idea on paper has become the tangible thing in front of you, about to become, as he puts it, “part of their reel of memories.”
His advice to clients: don’t assume every AV company is the same. “There are similarities in the gear and the brand names, but each company operates and maintains its equipment at a different tier, with its own identity and a unique signature.” Choosing a partner is choosing that signature.
Ask him for the ritual he goes through before doors and he won’t give you one. “Every event, every show is different, regardless of how many years of being in the industry.” Ask which event he’s proudest of and the answer takes the same shape: no two are alike, and every one has something in it he keeps. It runs through everything he says — in this work, nothing is interchangeable.
On site, Mike is the one who cares that every event succeeds. He wants clients ecstatic about their vision coming to life, and he wants the people who made it happen — office, shop, crew, techs, operators — to get the credit. Away from work, he’s with family and friends, appreciating the subtle details in life that sometimes pass us by.
Jeff Blain — Senior AV Producer (in the industry since 1996)
Jeff runs your show floor. He builds the technical plan with you ahead of time and then leads the crew on site, so the person answering your questions on the day is the same person who designed the day.
Read More
A high school drama teacher in Windsor noticed Jeff was good at math and science and also kept turning up around the stage, and decided those two things belonged together. That led to a four-hour call loading trucks for the opening of Ontario’s first casino in May 1994. The four hours turned into a week: a lighting technician named Bill Beckton pulled him off the truck to assist, taught him the electrical side, and became a lifelong mentor. It was Jeff’s first paycheque for something he’d have done for free.
He took the lighting designer’s award at the provincial drama festival, trained in the first class of Fanshawe College’s theatre arts program, and apprenticed with IATSE before finding a steady home at Straight Street. Those early years also took him to Pope John Paul II’s World Youth Day appearance in Toronto and to programming moving lights for Aretha Franklin. In 2008 he left on good terms for Toronto and spent years touring and producing corporate events around the world, his focus shifting from lighting to production management and to the clients themselves. During the pandemic, Keith called and asked him to come home.
What he loves is the two halves of the same night: walking into an empty space and turning it into something magical, then the energy exchange between a performer, the crew and the audience once the room is full. “When a show is firing on all cylinders,” he says, “there is nothing more special.”
His last check before doors isn’t the equipment, it’s the crew: ready, comfortable, engaged, and clear on what’s coming. “In events no one is an island,” he says. “We achieve or fail together.”
Away from the venues he’s with his family and their puppies, usually over a shared meal or a board game.
The Crew
Behind every senior AV producer is a crew clients notice by name. In their own reviews, clients have singled out crew chief Kyle for making the show happen, and Andy and Paul on ice shows — the people who turn a plan into a night that runs without a hitch.