The Battleax Award: To Ted Hoover, who defined the term as a Sherman tank of a Lady Bracknell in "Importance of Being Earnest" (Unseam'd).
Bravery under fire: To Lynn Cullen for tackling the text of "The Vagina Monologues" before a large and avid audience with less than one complete rehearsal.
"Nothing became his life so well as the leaving of it" Award: Though the variety and energy of his tenure at Penn Avenue Theater will be missed as Michael E. Moats moves on to other projects, he passed the ultimate test with flying colors: He found a successor, Mark Clayton Southers, to take over his theater and keep it moving ahead.
Tin ear: The Public's otherwise lovely "H.M.S. Pinafore" could afford only seven musicians for Arthur Sullivan's brilliant score.
Art history: City Theater staged two investigations of the role of biography in art -- "Inventing Van Gogh" and "The Credeaux Canvas."
Revolutionary special: Meanwhile, CMU held a two-part seminar in pre-Revolutionary 18th-century France, "The Marriage of Figaro" and "Game of Love and Chance," buttressing them with medieval socialism ("Red Noses") and contemporary Balkan apocalypse ("Pentecost"). Invigorating!
Location, location, location: Quantum retains the title of most adventuresome, this year using a warehouse, cemetery and recording studio. But PMT boldly used Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall for "The Civil War." And Unseam'd showed that a beautiful space doesn't always work: The domestic battles of "Lion in Winter" were dwarfed by the Third Presbyterian Church.
Most misguided remake of a classic: Dog & Pony Show's transposition of Strindberg's "Miss Julie" into a different play about different people in a different time.
Most gutless rewrite: "Saturday Night Fever" was a shallow film about a shallow generation. But in adapting it to the musical stage, to sell tickets to people who think the '70s were cool, the producers excised a rape scene that would have put the values of the Me Generation in perspective.
Most Caucasians at a Kuntu show: Not enough. The creative work being done by Kuntu Repertory Theatre is being overlooked by the white audience.
Most chutzpah: Edgar Allan Poe Theater's Michael McGovern is like that TV commercial bunny who keeps going and going and going. Sometimes he ends up in the soup, but he keeps moving forward.
Best fans: The theater community has its share of blowhards, but in Playhouse Rep's "Breaker Morant," a series of fans blew a scenic and thematic tornado of paper across the stage.
Best death scene: Quantum's "Indian Ink" was performed in a cemetery.
Best exit: After decades as a skin-of-his-teeth, for-profit dinner theater (and "Nunsense") survivor, Jude Pohl made a remarkably calm if abrupt departure from the stage scene.
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