The Craig Noel Awards, chosen by the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle, were presented in February. The top winner was A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, which ran at the Old Globe (in a co-production with Hartford Stage in Connecticut). The musical won five awards, including best new musical, direction of a musical (Darko Tresnjak) and lead performance in a musical (Jefferson Mays). Other winners included The Bluest Eye from Moxie Theatre and Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company, which won for ensemble and play direction (Delicia Turner Sonnenberg).
Second Stage Theatre in New York City has presented its second annual Donna Perret Rosen Award for musical theatre to emerging composer/lyricist Peter Mills. The award comes with $10,000.
Meanwhile, at the nearby Fractured Atlas, winners were announced for the association’s first-ever National Arts Entrepreneurship Awards. Honored for their innovative approaches to arts organizations and career models were Josh Meyer and Matt Hislope, co-founders of Austin, Tex.’s Rubber Repertory Theatre Company; Julia Rhoads of Creative Partners in Chicago; Esther Robinson of ArtHome in New York City; Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo from Of a Kind in New York City; and Todd Scalise of Higherglyphics. The winners will receive a lifelong membership in Fractured Atlas.
Witness Uganda, by Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews, is the winner of the 2014 Richard Rodgers Production Award for Musical Theater. The award is presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which underwrote the premiere production of Witness Uganda at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
Theatre critic Scott Brown is the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism for 2012–13. The award is administered by the English Department at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Brown was the theatre critic for New York Magazine from 2010 to 2013.
Weston Playhouse Theatre Company in Vermont has selected the winner of its eighth annual New Musical Award. The prize goes to Sarah Hammond and Adam Gwon’s String, which had a public concert at the Weston Playhouse in March and will receive a private concert in New York City and a demo CD from Sh-K-Boom Records.
InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia has chosen the plays in its 20/20 New Play Commissions: Neighborhood Watch by Rehana Lew Mirza and Sanctity by Idris Goodwin. Both writers will receive development opportunities at the theatre. In addition, InterAct also announced a development award to George Brant, to support the creation of his not-yet-finished play Miracle: A Tragedy.
The Drama League in New York City has chosen the recipients of its 2014 Artist Residency Program, which offers 10 artists the opportunity to develop new work at the Drama League Theater Center. The residents are Rachel Dickstein, Jeremy Bloom, Anna Brenner, Michael Goldfried, Daniel Nelson, Kevin Doyle, Jesse Jou, Christopher Swader and Justin Swader. One of the works, The World Is Round, by Dickstein, is playing at Brooklyn Academy of Music this month.
Dennis Staroselsky is the 2014 playwright-in-residence at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting’s Harold Clurman Playwrights Division. The residency is for emerging playwrights, giving them a year to develop a new piece, with access to studio space and actors for readings and workshops.
In February, the Dramatists Guild of America held its annual awards ceremony in New York City. The recipients of the organization’s various writing awards were Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green, the Frederick Loewe Award; Arthur Kopit, the Flora Roberts Award; Mike Lew, the Lanford Wilson Award; Christopher Durang, the Hull-Warriner Award; Lisa Kron and Viola Davis, the Madge Evans & Sidney Kingsley Awards; and John Guare, the Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition, the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund presented the first-ever Defender Award to Larissa Mark, a senior from Trumbull High in Philadelphia, who successfully rallied her community to oppose her school’s cancellation of a production of Rent.
This month, Huntington Theatre Company trustee John D. Spooner and writer/director Mary Zimmerman will be presented with the Wimberly Award at HTC’s 2014 Spotlight Spectacular. Spooner has served on the Boston theatre’s board since 2002. Zimmerman has directed four productions at HTC.
Mary Rose Lloyd, director of artistic programming at the New Victory Theater in New York City, received the Mickey Miners Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2014 International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY) Conference in Pittsburgh in January, for her work in theatre for young audiences.
Kate D. Levin is the first fellow at the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Levin is a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. As a fellow, Levin’s job will include communicating with arts organizations across the country and raising awareness of NCAR’s research.
