By Hap Erstein
Tonight, the South Florida theater community gets together for the 35th annual Carbonell Awards, the citations for excellence among area professional theaters that has been shrouded in controversy in recent years.
Last year, as you may recall, the awards board of directors announced the program would be suspended to study and fix the perceived deficiencies in the system.
Predictably, perhaps, the cry of outrage over not having the Carbonells was far louder than the yelps of disappointment over the way the awards were being run. So if the suspension was a ploy by the board to get the dissatisfied to appreciate what we have, it worked.
I can’t think of a single awards programs anywhere that hasn’t had problems and charges of inequities, and the benefits of having awards – added media attention to resident theater, career boosts to winners, bragging rights for grant applicatons, etc. – clearly outweigh not having them.
Going into tonight’s ceremony at the Broward Center’s Amaturo Theatre, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties each have 36 nominations, followed by Broward theaters’ 27.
Actors’ Playhouse of Coral Gables’s Miss Saigon pulled in the most nominations (11) of any production this year, and should be battling it out with the Maltz Jupiter’s La Cage aux Folles and Mack and Mabel at Broward Stage Door for Best Musical. Personally, I thought the Maltz’s standout production of Anything Goes deserved to be vying for the award, but while it did earn seven nominations – two for director-choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge and three for the show’s performers – Tari Kelly, Bret Shuford, Tom Beckett – it failed to make the top award cut.
(Full disclosure: I am a Carbonell judge, which means I was one of seven people who traveled throughout South Florida last year, seeing the 42 shows that a larger group of recommenders agreed were award-worthy in some category. Then the judges met to discuss the merits of the performances, design work and productions to generate a slate of nominees. But the final vote by the judges is done by e-mail, so I am as in the dark about the eventual winners as anyone.)
The Best Play Carbonell looks to be a battle among Mosaic Theatre’s flawlessly performed Collected Stories; the controversial Blasted at GableStage, of which I wasn’t a fan; and Palm Beach Dramaworks’ American Buffalo. Here too, since we are quibbling, Dramaworks’ production of Freud’s Last Session is a puzzling no-show in this category.
Easier to project are the categories for Best Ensemble, which seems likely to be won by the Maltz’s 12 Angry Men and Best New Work, which should go to Christopher Demos-Brown’s When the Sun Shone Brighter at Florida Stage.
Unless I am wrong about the winners, which I usually am. In any event, you can read a full report of the event and the egregiously overlooked tomorrow right here.