2008
2010
Production and Director
The Best Production award for 2009 goes to All's Well That Ends Well at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. A small-stage production of an improbable love story told with threadbare ingenuity, including ingenious use of a silent-movie clown using an old-time film projector, is a charming and emotional triumph.
The Best Director award for 2009 goes to Amanda Dehnert, also for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's All's Well That Ends Well. Dehnert intimately stages a black-box production of the difficult text, presenting with great warmth a realistic love story filled with complex characters and told with passion, intelligence, and abundant humor.
Performance
The Best Actress award for 2009 goes to Kjerstine Rose Anderson as Helena in All's Well That Ends Well at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Anderson strikes the perfect balance of pluck and perseverance along with girlish appeal for her Helena, an enchanting performance at the heart of a big-hearted production.
The Best Actor award for 2009 goes to Kevin Rich in the title role at the Illinois Shakespeare's Festival's Richard III. Rich's Richard is at first a vaudevillian entertainer in a bowtie, gloves, and tails, with a flower in his lapel, sporting a bowler and a cane as well as a reddish goatee, then a tyrannical monarch well out of his element commanding a kingdom.
The Best Supporting Actor award for 2009 goes to Jon Michael Hill as Ariel in The Tempest at Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Hill's chin-bearded Ariel resembles a television sports gladiator, well-muscled and athletic, who is at once an exuberantly physical young man cavorting in carnival-like acrobatics as well as a restless black man yearning for his freedom.
The Best Supporting Actress award for 2009 goes to Kate Cook as Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Cook's Helena, a delicate balance of social intelligence and romantic desperation, is bespectacled and bookwormish, a sophisticated New Yorker struggling to maintain dignity and poise in a magical forest.
Technicals
The Best Scenic Design award for 2009 goes to Lucy Osborne for Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. A gigantic heart shape rises twenty feet from the stage, framing a stage of long wooden planks that serves as a boardwalk around an enormous swimming pool of seven thousand gallons of water.
The Best Costume Design award for 2009 goes to Susan E. Mickey for Henry VIII at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Mickey's designs are lush and varied, from the swashbuckling king and his many courtiers, to the Spanish-born queen and her elaborately attired pre-Elizabethan ladies-in-waiting, to the cardinal and his army of bishops and priests.
The Best Lighting Design award for 2009 goes to Philip S. Rosenberg for Macbeth at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. A series of memorably lit locations - from a sleazy strip club to an airport terminal to the campy Hollywood slasher movie styling of the murder at the Macduff home - are highlighted by the image of Banquo as a crowned king, taunting Macbeth as he turns on a slowly spinning dais while brilliant flashes of light reflect from a small upstage wall of mirrored tiles.
The Best Sound and Music Design award for 2009 goes to Rick Fox and Todd Charlton for A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. A stunning and fully-realized heavy metal musical motif, with hammering guitars and banging drums crashing in recurring hard rock-and-roll interludes, culminating in an elaborate center stage dance - like a big-hair early-1980s MTV video - with the fairy world in synchronized boogie moves to thundering music as the audience spontaneously claps along.