Nominations released for Rideau Awards,

Player’s Advice to Shakespeare leads list of local nominees

A play featuring a guy with a carrot leads the nominee list for this year’s Rideau Awards.

The Player’s Advice to Shakespeare, a pitch-perfect New Theatre of Ottawa production about a member of Shakespeare’s acting company who’s locked up in the Tower of London, has received six nominations, including outstanding production, director (John Koensgen), male performance (Greg Kramer, who uses that carrot as everything from a pen to a sword) and emerging artist (playwright Brian K. Stewart).

Nominations for the sixth annual, bilingual awards celebrating locally produced professional theatre were released Tuesday.

They were selected from a pool of 42 English and 10 French productions, all from calendar year 2012. Winners will be announced in April.

That fellow in the tower has some stiff competition. The Great Canadian Theatre Company’s incisive production of East of Berlin, Hannah Moscovitch’s drama about the legacy of the Holocaust, garnered five nominations: production, direction (Joël Beddows), male performer (Simon Bradshaw) and two for design — Ivo Valentik’s set and Martin Conboy’s lighting. Beddows, Valentik and Conboy are all past award winners.

MiCasa Theatre’s Live from the Belly of a Whale — part cabaret, part storytelling, totally irrepressible — is also up in five categories. They include direction (Patrick Gauthier) and, like East of Berlin, a double design nomination: Guillaume Houët for lighting and John Doucet, whose set includes a giant armoire where much of the story occurs. Doucet is also up for the emerging artist award.

Other nominations include St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for production and Catriona Leger’s direction, and GCTC’s The Secret Mask in the production and male performer (Paul Rainville) categories.

Emanant Productions’ Vernus says SURPRISE, Ken Godmere’s clownbased tale about aging, is nominated for production and new creation awards.

Female performance nominees include Margo MacDonald for her portrait of perennially nervous Loretta in GCTC’s hilarious Fly Me to the Moon, Madeleine Boyes-Manseau in Sasa Theatre’s The Open Couple, and Kathi Langston as an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Mabel’s Last Performance and Kristina Watt for multiple performances in New Theatre of Ottawa’s inaugural Extremely Short Play Festival.

In French theatre, Théâtre de la Vielle 17’s production of Mansel Robinson’s Il (Deux) is the frontrunner. Collective paranoia and fear of “otherness” underpin the play, nominated for production, direction (Geneviève Pineault), design and three other awards.

It’s butting heads with, among others, Zone and Albertine en 5 temps, both Théâtre de la catapulte productions with five nominations each.

As befits Canada’s capital, some names appear among both English and French nominees. They include Paul Rainville as male performer in Théâtre de la Vielle 17’s ABC Démolition. For a full list of nominees, find this story at ottawacitizen.com/ arts