2013
Production and Director
The Best Production award for 2014 goes to a rock-and-roll The Merry Wives of Windsor at Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder. Set in the Catskills gambling resort of Mount Windsor in the early 1960s, this throwback delight is jammed front-to-end with upbeat period rock and roll music, including an onstage mambo lesson with the dancing troupe instructing volunteers from the audience, plus the show features the Pages like Rob and Laura Petrie, an Elvis impersonator Sir Hugh Parsons, and a scene stealing Doctor Caius as a thickly-accented golf pro.
The Best Director award for 2014 goes to Seth Panitch, also for Colorado Shakespeare Festival's The Merry Wives of Windsor. Panitch's rock-and-roll update of Shakespeare's rather flimsy comedy is a visual and aural spectacle, quickly paced and loaded with clever flourishes like Pistol and Nym being a one-man ventriloquist act and his dummy, the frantic pursuit of Falstaff by the jealous Ford being set to "Wipeout" by the Surfaris, and the closing trick being an extended Halloween party prank that concludes in everyone's happiness to a "Be My Baby" dance and sing-along.
Performance
The Best Actress award for 2014 goes to Deborah Staples for her portrayal of the titular Egyptian queen in Antony and Cleopatra at Illinois Shakespeare Festival in Bloomington. Staples's black-haired beauty is a mercurial Queen in her physical prime, still young and lean and beautiful, a dangerously perfect imperfection of smart and spoiled. Staples's pragmatic but self-indulgent Cleopatra balances sentimental and sultry, and she poses herself, standing boldly on her throne, or defying with head back and a hand on her hip, or feigning a melodramatic faint not once but twice.
The Best Actor award for 2014 goes to Michael Winters as a sympathetically desperate Sir Jack Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor at Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Winters's Falstaff clings like a dissipated Rat Pack lounge star to his waning notoriety and his fading physicality, as well as his not-much-to-begin-with onstage talent. A tour de force and a brilliant triple-killing season for Winters, who also played the larger-than-life Falstaff in 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV at the same festival, delivering memorable star turns as the same character in three different productions helmed by three different directors. Honorable mention to Colm Feore for his sick-with-anger title-role performance in King Lear at Stratford Festival.
The Best Supporting Actor award for 2014 goes to Joshua Archer for his brutish and hulking Caliban in Colorado Shakespeare Festival's The Tempest. Archer's dangerous Caliban muscles around the stage like a boxer, head down and eyes up, looking for trouble, and his vomitous green body-suit is bumped with boils and pustules and a thick tail that drags behind him, split at the end like a fish. To his credit, by the conclusion Archer has poignantly revealed some of the aching humanity deep within the monster in his purple hat and torn white shorts.
The Best Supporting Actress award for 2014 goes to Seana McKenna for her wounded Constance in King John at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. McKenna's smothering mother reveals an ill-divining soul beyond her passion-filled cries, almost as if she is grieving in advance the violent loss of her son, a death that precipitates the fall of a King. In an unforgettable moment, she stammers on against the politicians around her, but her eyes dramatically reveal that she realizes know one is listening to her and worse, it does not matter what she says. Honorable mention to Colleen Madden for her hand-wringing and teary-eyed Nurse in Romeo and Juliet at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Technicals
The Best Scenic Design award for 2014 goes to Kent Homchick for the visual delight of The Tempest at Colorado Shakespeare Festival, a colorful cartoon of both a deserted island and a 16th-century ocean ship about to flounder in a raging storm. For the ship, a big wooden wheel is mounted on a center-stage platform, flanked by steep steps, masts and riggings to either side, with billowing sails, coiled lengths of rope and cabin doors all clearly visible. Stage left is a little tepee-style hut decorated with sea shells, and above is both a crow's nest and a place for a calculating wizard to observe his magical machinations.
The Best Costume Design award for 2014 goes to Kim Krumm Sorenson for the fairy-tale variety within As You Like It at Great Lakes Theatre in Cleveland. Set in 1920s New England, the city-versus-country romance is designed with a colorful array of costumes that add a delightful touch to the bicycle-built-for-two temperament of the show, from the gowns of the leading ladies to the pitch-perfect feel of the Ardens hunters or the blue uniforms of the man-hunting police department.
The Best Lighting Design award for 2014 goes to Jesse Klug for the sea-faring adventure story of Pericles at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. All the different Mediterranean locations are signified by lighting effects as well as backdrop images and effects like smoke and torches, but it is Klug's evocative mood lighting that captures the spirit of each of the title hero's adventures.
The Best Original Music and Sound Design award for 2014 goes to Shannon O'Neill for the scoring - and on-stage musicianship - of the all-male cast Much Ado About Nothing at Illinois Shakespeare Festival. The music is played live by a small chamber orchestra of three musicians in the balcony, and the evocative score ranges impressively from jaunty for the homecoming celebration to a country flair for the square-dance and line-dancing and all its accompanying handclasps, to cinematic strings for the love scenes. Honorable mention to Jason Ducat for the 1960s-era musical soundtrack of Colorado Shakespeare Festival's The Merry Wives of Windsor, spot-on choices played loud and proud as if spun right from a 50-year-old radio dial.