2007
2009
Production and Director
The Best Production award for 2008 goes to The Comedy of Errors at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, a wonderful world premiere about a misfit band of British film-makers struggling to complete a movie version of The Comedy at Shepperton Studios during the London Blitz of 1940.
The Best Director award for 2008 goes to Barbara Gaines, also for The Comedy of Errors, at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater that she founded and continues to serve as artistic director. Gaines fashions a period-piece from the 1930s in a masterful blend of colorfully comic Shakespeare and fast-paced ensemble screwball comedy. A richly detailed slate of delightful new characters and an ingenious movie-within-a-play, exceptionally staged.
Performance
The Best Actress award for 2008 goes to Nikki M. James, for her sultry and sexy Cleopatra transforming from naïve teenager to slinking sex kitten to determined queen in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
In a close race, the Best Actor award for 2008 goes to Christopher Plummer for his waning but brilliant-minded Caesar, also from Caesar and Cleopatra at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Honorable mention to Ben Carlson as Hamlet at the same company, a more richly-realized, deeper and darker reprise of his Hamlet in Chicago during 2006, but Plummer gets the nod for star power, stage mastery, and in guiding James much as Caesar guided Cleopatra.
The Best Supporting Actor award for 2008 goes to Scott Wentworth's multi-textured Claudius in Hamlet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Youngish and lusty, consumed with guilt but sternly defiant, the depth of Wentworth's characterization evokes another tragedy within the famous tragedy.
The Best Supporting Actress award for 2008 goes to Adrienne Gould for her Ophelia, also in Hamlet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Gould's Ophelia is naïve and innocent, then subdued and crushed by the play's tragic events, and her madness scene is a superbly-played study in heart-broken grief rather than a melodramatic depiction of insanity.
Technicals
The Best Scenic Design award for 2008 goes to Neil Patel for The Comedy of Errors at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, for his richly detailed period-piece depiction of London's vast Shepperton Studios in 1940, including separate movie-sets for scenes from the play being filmed and a stunning roof collapse scene during an air raid.
The Best Costume Design award for 2008 goes to Rachel Healy for A Midsummer Night's Dream at American Players Theatre, for her stunning array of colorful and fabulously detailed designs, especially Titania's fairies, literally a cobweb, a mustardseed, a moth, and a peaseblossom.
The Best Lighting Design award for 2008 goes to Robert Wierzel for The Comedy of Errors at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, for shifting from the mammoth film studio to the brightly intimate sets to a strobe-like evocation of the effects of a Luftwaffe bombing blitz.
The Best Sound and Music Design award for 2008 goes to Todd Charlton for Hamlet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, with his eerie and evocative scoring played live on stage by a chamber quartet of violin, oboe, piano, and drum and cymbal.