2017 Theater Awards Errors and Corrections

These are corrections we made after the nominations originally went to press:

Butterflies are Free [Arctic Playhouse] opened in late June, after the cut-off for this year’s awards, and will be eligible for next year’s awards cycle. Both it and Yellow Wallpaper [Out Loud] received a few nods from our nominators, who didn’t realize their open dates made them ineligible this year. One nomination for Christopher O’Brien in Butterflies snuck past the editors, but the nomination was noticed before voting started and moved to next year.

It has also been pointed out that Equus [Epic] opened on June 2, when the cut off was June 1. That also escaped our notice until voting was already underway and removing it would have screwed up several categories. So we decided it was okay to stretch the deadline by one day in the spirit of a little horse play.

We confused Shining Light Production’s Young Frankenstein with the Norton Singers’ Young Frankenstein. Anthony Torelli was nominated for the Norton Singers version.

We originally misspelled Diego Guevara.

Reza C. Clifton’s middle initial was added.

Jacob J Zentis was corrected from our original shortening of his first name to Jake.

Victoria Jessop from CCRI played Mary Ann (not Agnes) in Sister Act. But don’t all nuns look the same anyway?

In Semi-Pro, we first listed Kelly McCabe for Head Trick’s She Would If She Could as a Supporting Female. Though we hear she’s very supportive, she belonged in Lead Female and we moved her nomination before voting began.

We added Arctic Playhouse to Daydream Theatre’s nomination for best concessions, since Daydream performs at Arctic.

A number of shows performed at AS220 were not produced by AS220. We indicated this by saying “at AS220,” so theatergoers could connect with where the play happened; this was still confusing to some, for which we apologize.

There are always some challenges to deciding which theater goes in which category. The rules we came up with are:

• If you are an equity house paying actors union wages, usually with union contracts, you’re professional.
• If you pay your actors, but don’t usually use union rates and/or contracts, we count you as semi-pro.
• If you generally don’t pay actors, or do a split of the door when it’s over a certain amount, we count you as community.

There are plenty of gray areas, because some theaters do shows of different sizes or different scales. There are some semi-pro groups that pay on the pro scale. There are some community theaters that do some shows that would count as semi-pro, and others that wouldn’t. Theaters like 2^nd Story, Wilbury, Head Trick and Newport Playhouse are challenges every year to figure out – and they’re not the only ones for which arguments could be made either way. We apologize, but no matter what we do, some people end up feeling either they or someone else is miscategorized. On the flip side, it was clearly not working to have shows from little community playhouses going up against shows from Trinity Rep, so we had to break things down somehow.