ATG Curtain Call Awards

Last Saturday night was one of the biggest night in the Adelaide theatre community: the ATG Dinner. At it, the ATG (Adelaide Theatre Guide) presents awards (the highly-sought-after¹ 'Curtain Call') for the standout productions and performances in South Australian theatre over the past year. This is the third fourth one I've attended, and the second as a presenter.

To get there I caught the bus into town – yes, in my suit and bow-tie – and, funnily enough, wasn't the most eccentric person on it; that honour went to an elderly Asian man who was practicing swings with his table tennis bat.

Like last year, the event took place in the Banquet Room at the Adelaide Festival Centre, and I believe we had a record turnout with something like four hundred guests attending. The format was the same as in previous years – a combination of three course meal, the awards and musical numbers from upcoming shows.

You can see the list of nominees here and the winners here.

Last year I'd presented the award for Best Technical; this year I'd been allocated Best Ensemble. Unlike last year, though, I had to write my own speech. Not that that was to prove much of a problem, but it's not something I've had to do for a few years. So, this was what I came up with:

"The ability of a team of performers to work together on stage to create a compelling, memorable experience for the audience is one of the most important aspects of theatre.

With that in mind the ‘Curtain Call’ award for Best Ensemble recognises the achievements of the cast of as a whole, independent of other technical aspects like sound, lighting, set or costumes.

While the standard for this in Adelaide theatre is - obviously - very high, each of the nominated casts has gone above and beyond that standard and demonstrated outstanding ability in this area."

I'd gotten reasonably lucky with the timing: the Best Ensembles were to be handed out at 9.30, so while I wouldn't be able to drink too heavily until after I'd be needing my faculties unadulterated by alcohol, it would be the exact opposite for the (somewhat daunting) audience – or, in other words, they'd have had enough time to drink themselves to the point where they'd be much more appreciative and I much more entertaining.

Thing is, while I have no problem whatsoever with acting in front a theatre full of people, I do find it somewhat more confronting to be myself in the same situation.

For those of you who aren't theatre people, you might be wondering what kind of atmosphere such an event would have. So, I'll take this opportunity to explain that when you take four hundred excited theatre people – a significant number of them having partaken of generous amounts of alcohol both prior to and during the evening – what you get is pretty much exactly how you'd imagine it to be, i.e. almost everybody being very loud and very exuberant.

We really are like that.

Anyway, after some songs, some other awards, and a few more drinks, it came to my turn to present and, like last year, my nervousness evaporated as I was announced by the MC and made my way to the podium – because the audience gave me a very rousing reception indeed.

The hard part, then, was over; all I had to do now was read out my (short) speech and the lists of nominees, open a couple of envelopes and hand out the trophies.

Not quite.

At every awards ceremony there is at least one person who ignores the request to make their acceptance speech short, and who seem to see it as an opportunity to demonstrate their skill at drunken extempore public speaking - and, of course, one of them was during my time at the podium.

The University of Adelaide Theatre Guild won Best Ensemble Amateur for their production of the David Williamson play Influence, and Emily Branford, who played the odious Carmela, came up to accept. She's a very talented performer, having appeared in several very good shows I've seen in the last few years – The Underpants, Scarborough and The Hypochondriac, amongst others – so when her speech went well beyond what one would consider an appropriate length, I wasn't really sure what I should do.

So, I just let her keep going. But I didn't have to wait too long for assistance, because her own table sent someone (fellow reviewer and the man who'd directed her in The Underpants, John Wells) who all but dragged her off stage – but not before she got in a (well-received) plea for the audience to not vote for Tony Abbott.

Not an easy act to follow, but I managed to get the focus back on to the winner of the Professional category, which turned out to be Windmill Theatre for their production of The Wizard of Oz – whose representative was, mercifully, brief and to the point.

My work was done.

Well, most of it. My unofficial, secondary job – getting drunk enough to muster up the courage to track down and speak to the people who'd been involved in the shows we'd honoured and which I'd seen and enjoyed – was still in front of me.

At ATG awards past I've demonstrated my fanboyish tendencies in front of people like actor Cameron Goodall and accompanist extraordinaire Matthew Carey; this year my targets were actor Nathan O'Keefe and director Andy Packer, who'd both been involved in probably the best theatrical production I've ever experienced², the winner of this year's Professional awards for Best Comedy and Best Technical, Man Covets Bird.

Fortunately, they were both very happy to be praised – a couple of trophies will almost always do that. And both were very friendly and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.

I'd spent the entire night at the same table as Hannah Norris, who ended up with the Best Actress Professional award for her role as the title character (okay, the only character) in the Fringe production of My Name is Rachel Corrie, without talking to her, mostly because I was slightly chagrined that I'd only given it four stars in my review when it really deserved four and half³. But such is the power of wine that I managed to overcome my hesitance and, when she wandered near me at one point I ended up congratulating her and explaining why I hadn't spoken to her earlier.

At another point in the night, though, I had the pleasure of – while not exactly the converse – some unexpected positive feedback from winner of Best Actor Amateur, Adam Tuominen; he'd seen Tempest and told me (unprompted) that he'd liked my performance.

Overall, it was a good night. Probably not as good as it should have been; there were some moments where I was struggling with what can only be described as social anxiety issues. As a result I spent a lot more time at my table rather than wandering around and talking to people – something that I now regret. But there were plenty of good parts, and I'll definitely be going again next year.

¹Well, we certainly hope it is, otherwise we're wasting a heck of a lot of our time. I know I'm pretty damn proud of having been in an award-winning show – The Crucible, which won Best Drama Amateur in 2007 - and I'd love to see another show I was in get nominated.
²I use that term deliberately, because it wasn't something you just saw. Read my review here to see what I had to say about it, but bear in mind that it doesn't do it justice, and I was forcing restraint upon myself so it didn't sound like a paid promotion.
³There were two reasons for this: a) some of the lighting they tried didn't work, and b) it wasn't as good as the show I'd seen the night before, Scaramouche Jones (review here - and I've just realised I didn't spot a typo in bildungsroman, and nor did my editor), which I'd given four and a half to and therefore couldn't rate a lesser show as highly.