1994
1996 
Production and Director
The Best Production award for 1995 goes to The Comedy of Errors at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, a brilliant Looney Tunes cartoon live on stage with colorful splashes of pre- and post-war Hollywood at a Keystone-Kops pace. A keenly imaginative - Cagney and Monroe and Stewart, plus the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges - and vividly entertaining triumph.
The Best Director award for 1995 goes to Stephen Rothman for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival's The Comedy of Errors. Rothman crafts a richly textured theatrical cartoon, staging with cleverly accessible language and an explosion of inventiveness, and culling infectious energy from his cast. A dizzying array of delightful concepts, brilliantly executed in an unabashed delight.
Performance
The Best Actress award for 1995 goes to Marian Mayberry for her Rosalind in Shakespeare Repertory's As You Like It. Mayberry's animated Rosalind charms thoughout, especially in her comical lapses from her disguise as Ganymede, as when she drops to her knees to embrace Celia in delight, then rises in embarrassment to speak to Orlando in a deepened manly tone.
The Best Actor award for 1995 goes to Bruce Orendorf in the title role as Henry V at the Next Theatre Company. Likeable with boyish good looks, Orendorf's young King convincingly reveals Henry's strengthening leadership, as with his rising fury at the Dauphin's scorn or table-top leap for the "once more unto the breach" war cry.
The Best Supporting Actor award for 1995 goes to Steve Pickering as a Machiavellian Iago in Shakespeare Repertory's Othello. Pickering's Iago resembles a raving Mussolini - clutching his bald head like a madman, laughing like a lunatic, and plotting like a fiend - and he rivets the audience with displays of unbridled hatred.
The Best Supporting Actress award for 1995 goes to Karen Renee Raymore as the lusty Luciana in The Comedy of Errors at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Raymore channels Marilyn Monroe in a white dress - her skirt lifting and swirling when she steps over as sewer grate - and is man hungry and delightfully expressive, walking into doors and falling down stairs.
Technicals
The Best Scenic Design award for 1995 goes to John C. Stark for The Comedy of Errors at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Stark's colorful setting - 1940s Hollywood - blazes with spirit and vaudevillian razzle-dazzle: a red brick building facing a Hollywood boulevard with advertisement billboards - Pepsi-Cola, Borden ice cream - adorning the set along with authentic posters from mid-'40s cinema.
The Best Costume Design award for 1995 goes to David Kay Mickelsen for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival's The Comedy of Errors. Doubled leads - the Syracuse twins in blue and the Ephesus twin in red - require a slew of high-speed costume changes afforded by a dazzling array of between-scenes silliness from a bicycle-riding ice cream salesman being chased by a bearded "little" boy and by street sweepers in Groucho glasses who change the set.
The Best Lighting Design award for 1995 goes to Kenneth Posner for Shakespeare Repertory's Troilus and Cressida. Posner lights the climactic battle from above, as well as from banks of lighting on either side of the theatre or through grates on the stage floor, alternating with rapid moments of darkness to achieve a stunning lightning-like strobe effect.
The Best Sound and Music Design award for 1995 goes to Robert Neuhaus and Lloyd Brodnax King for Shakespeare Repertory's Othello. Onstage musicians perform with flute and drums as well as with a steel pipe, reeds, and a gong, the score alternating from regal and sophisticated to tribal and primitive. The musicians create an abundance of sound effects that range from timpanic drumming and bursts of woodwind to grunts, groans, hums and sighs, and they utilize ingenious instruments such as a stick filled with millet (a "rain tree") for the sound of rainfall, or a finger circling the rim of a brandy snifter to create an eerily high-pitched hum.