On Saturday, August 11 at 8:00pm, members of The Players Theatre Company and Stage Right of Texas crowded into the historic Crighton Theatre for the seventh annual Montie Awards ceremony.
I've previously covered the Montie Awards in a blog post on August 2. In that one, I talked about the history of the awards and talked about my history of nominations as well as this year's ceremony.
The ceremony this year was relatively brisk. All 25 awards were given out in 2 and a half hours. Every few categories, they had performances from the musicals produced this year. As with the Tony awards, the performances are my favorite part of the ceremony every year.
Three of those performances were from musicals I directed this last year. From Beauty and the Beast, we had the title song, sung by Kim Lambright, who won the award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical moments before.
From Little Women: The Musical, Lizzie Camp sang "Astonishing". And the cast of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee reunited for the hair-raising "The I Love You Song", which justly received a standing ovation.
I genuinely had goosebumps during all three performances. I'm so proud of the work all of these people did.
I think I've said enough good things to go ahead and admit that I did not win the award I was nominated for. I was disappointed, but I think the rest of the evening made up for it.
Two actresses I directed won awards for their roles. Kim Lambright, as I mentioned, won "Best Supporting Actress in a Musical". In addition, Terry Woods, who played Aunt March in Little Women, received the award for "Best Featured Actress in a Musical".
In addition, a number of actors and actresses I've worked with received awards. They are far too numerous for me to list here without fearing that I'll miss someone, so see the full list of nominees and winners available on the Monties website.
It's always an honor to be nominated, and to see a lot of genuine love for the theater come out of the awards. All throughout the acceptance speeches, I heard through lines of community, a sense of family, of a love for moving the audience.
There are always winners and losers in an awards scenario, but the important thing is to keep that big picture in mind. We are artists for the love of three things:
- The art we create
- The audience we interact with
- The other artists we collaborate with
Everything else is secondary.