The Justin Awards: 2007

One Man's Opinions on the Best Performances

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Production and Director

The Best Production award for 2007 goes to King Lear at the Stratford Festival of Canada, a traditional staging of the complex tragedy with an amiable and injured rather than senile or sadistic Lear at its center.

In a close race, the Best Director award for 2007 goes to Barbara Gaines for her complex treatment of multiple stories and characters and themes within Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Troilus and Cressida, barely edging Brian Bedford, doubling as director and star of the Stratford Festival of Canada's King Lear.

Performance

The Best Actress award for 2007 goes to Chaon Cross as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Cross's beautiful Cressida is a lithe and muscular heroine, a defiant lover crushed in an unjust war.

The Best Actor award for 2007 goes to Brian Bedford in the title role of King Lear at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Bedford's exceptional Lear travels a tragic arc from outraged disbelief with a dose of hostility to reflexive sorrow with an anguished undercurrent of pathos.

The Best Supporting Actor award for 2007 goes to Peter Donaldson for his compellingly steadfast Kent in the Stratford Festival of Canada's King Lear.

Elizabeth Larson. Best Supporting Actress 2007. Photo by Pete Guither.

The Best Supporting Actress award for 2007 goes to Elizabeth Larson as the vivacious princess becoming suddenly and dramatically matured in the Illinois Shakespeare Festival's Love's Labour's Lost.

Technicals

Aleksandra Maslik. Best Scenic Design 2007. Photo by Pete Guither.

The Best Scenic Design award for 2007 goes to Aleksandra Maslik for Love's Labour's Lost at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Maslik stages the lighthearted romantic game-playing upon a green and white checkerboard, the characters like game pieces on an over-sized playing field.

The Best Costume Design award for 2007 goes to Ann Curtis for King Lear at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Curtis' designs feature wonderfully layered costuming from Shakespeare's seventeenth century.

The Best Lighting Design award for 2007 goes to Robert Wierzel for Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Troilus and Cressida, especially the twice-used image of battlefield dead returning as ghostly images in an eerie backlit glow.

The Best Sound and Music Design award for 2007 goes to Lindsay Jones and George Stiles for Troilus and Cressida at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, adroitly accompanying the myriad battle sequences with war-like sound effects and martial music.