Honoring breadth of Bay Area theater
Cal Shakes’ ‘Black Odyssey’ among big winners at annual TBA Awards
Theater is an inherently ephemeral art form. When a show you love is over, you can’t replay it. Even reading a script or watching a filmed version gives only a shadow of the magic of live performance.
That’s what makes the TBA Awards ceremony so special. Produced by the theater service nonprofit Theatre Bay Area (where, for the record, I was on staff 2013-15) and held Monday, Oct. 30, at the Herbst Theatre, the fourth annual event gave theater fans one more chance to come together and assert that performances, feats of stagecraft, designs and scripts mattered and continue to matter.
One show that clearly mattered to the program’s approximately 400 adjudicators (theater artists, administrators and producers whom Theatre Bay Area has selected from throughout the region) was California Shakespeare Theater’s “Black Odyssey,” which took home prizes for costume design, creative specialties (which went to playwright Marcus Gardley, for his “adaptation/translation”), direction and overall production, and multiple acting awards: two for individual performances (Aldo Billingslea and Margo Hall), as well as one for the whole ensemble.
But TBA Awards don’t just honor our flagship companies. The ceremony had 27 award categories, and most of those categories had awards in three separate tiers, with companies divided into groups based on their budget size and the sort of contract they have with the Ac-
tors’ Equity Association — so that community theaters weren’t competing against those with multimilliondollar budgets.
So just as ACT’s “A Night With Janis Joplin” won awards, so did much smaller companies like Ragged Wing Ensemble (for both “Overnight” and “The Winter’s Tale”), Lorraine Hansberry Theatre (for whom Aldo Billingslea won a directing award for “Home”), Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre (for “Bad Jews”) and Ubuntu Theater Project (for “To the Bone”).
The sheer range of honored companies, in terms of not just size but geography and artistic mission, makes for a resounding rebuttal to any who still think that San Francisco isn’t a theater town, or that the only shows worth seeing are the touring Broadway ones.
For those who are already familiar with the region’s major theater companies, the ceremony showcased many smaller outfits worthy of attention. Matthew Dean, reprising a number from Berkeley Playhouse’s “Billy Elliot,” gave a ballet performance of astonishing maturity and grace. Remember this kid’s name. (Minutes later, he won a TBA Award for that part.) The ensemble of Contra Costa Civic Theatre’s “In the Heights” performed a rendition of the show’s “96,000” with whipsmart, even gymnastic choreography, infectious energy and limpid vocals. (Cast member Dave Abrams was one of the award winners.)
A smoother ceremony than in years past, this event clocked in at 2½ hours, but next year’s show might be a bit longer. Among the most exciting parts of the evening was the announcement that new categories of shows would be eligible for awards in the 2017-18 season: improv, sketch comedy, drag and circus. Circus actually featured prominently in this year’s ceremony, with hosts Tristan Cunningham and Jeff Raz incorporating juggling and shoulder stands into their patter.
But it’s another innovation, also announced at the ceremony, that will likely define next year’s event. Theatre Bay Area is nixing the practice of giving separate awards to male and female actors. All acting categories will be “gender nonspecific,” though the organization will still give two awards in each category, to ensure the same number of actors get honored. The progressive move makes much-needed space for transgender actors; more subtly, it’s a call for the industry to stop treating women’s acting contributions as separate from and thus unequal to men’s. Your move, Tony Awards and Oscars!
For a full list of award winners, visit www.theatre bayarea.org.