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Swank never satisfied the cognescenti, and Rep never made it to Broadway. But The Miracle Worker drew priceless PR and hordes of new theatergoers who had never plumped their butts at Booth Playhouse before. They liked what they saw, and we daresay they'll be back if the product and the marketing are right. The plug has been pulled -- temporarily -- on the Broadway/Hollywood glitz, but there's plenty more of that same honest-to-god quality in humbler homegrown form. It's scattered around Charlotte like we've never seen before.
OK, enough analysis -- here are CL's 17th Annual Charlotte Theater Awards:
THEATERPERSONS OF THE YEAR
Yes, it has come to this. With the crowning of Stan Peal as CL's top award winner, Charlotte's theater world is ruled by a gnome. It can hardly be otherwise, since the actor/director/playwright/producer was everywhere throughout 2003, providing prime entertainment every step of the way.
For starters, he and wife Laura Depta (Best Supporting Comedy Actress of 2003) founded Epic Arts Repertory Theatre, choosing the new SouthEnd Performing Arts Center as their base of operations. The company's first year has been fueled with fresh innovative material, all of it written or adapted for the stage by Peal.
Most notable among the playwright's new opuses was The Friar & The Nurse, an engaging footnote to Romeo and Juliet starring Peal and Depta -- a runaway winner in our Best Original Play race. His new one-act play, "The Businessman and the Cheerleader," helped to crown The Hotel Project as Theatre Event of the Year. Commissioned for that event by Rep refugees Matt Olin and Anne Lambert, the site-specific comedy staged at the Uptown Marriott Presidential Suite also clinched the election of our new Actress of the Year.
That would have been plenty to earmark Peal as a prime Theaterperson contender. But he also provided fine new material for Halloween and Solstice celebrations at SPAC, adapting Poe's "Hop-Frog" and going Monty-Python pagan in A Mad Mad Madrigal. Peal even ventured briefly into the mainstream as a pint-sized Sancho Panza, helping to make Man of La Mancha the best musical we saw at Theatre Charlotte.
Eleven years after the quixotic Charlotte Shakespeare Company died of financial asphyxiation, CSC founder Lon Bumgarner rekindled memories of how he had bestrode the local scene before his Achilles-like withdrawal. He was joyously back in the midst of things -- without a vengeance.
Directing for Theatre Charlotte, Epic Arts, and BareBones Theatre Group, Bumgarner reclaimed Director of the Year honors for the first time since we gave him the title in 1990 -- when we inaugurated the award. He was at the peak of his game at Theatre Charlotte, radically reimagining Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit without a single misstep. It was like the good old days, when Bumgarner was winning our Best Comedy Director accolades at the Queens Road barn for The House of Blue Leaves (1987) and The Boys Next Door (1990).
Bumgarner was also at the cutting edge, piloting a tight, swift, and madly farcical production of Don't Dress for Dinner with BareBones Theatre Group, cementing his comedy credentials. There was just one summit meeting between Bumgarner and co-titleist Peal last year when the CSC founder brought his Shakespearean expertise to The Friar & the Nurse. Not only did Bumgarner direct the Peal-Depta duo to perfection, he designed the best set ever at SPAC. Lonny, we hardly knew ye!
Even in failure, Bumgarner impressed. At his half of the award-winning Hotel Project, he had his actors believing so deeply in a script pretentiously subtitled "The Secret Life of an Albatross" that both of them were sobbing and emitting a pool of gooey fluid from their facial orifices. Imagine if the script hadn't been a dreary mediocrity!
DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR
While he doesn't have a company of his own anymore, Lon Bumgarner still knows how to build one. He began his ascent back to the director's throne at Actor's Theatre late in 2002 when he piloted CL's Best Drama winner, The Laramie Project. Moving along to do a radically different piece for BareBones, Bumgarner brought a cluster of actors and actresses with him from Laramie to leap the chasm between grim docudrama and the frenetic frivolities of Don't Dress for Dinner.
By the time he triumphed at Theatre Charlotte, the Pied Piper motif was obvious. Former Bumgarner sidekick Carl McIntyre, the last managing director at Charlotte Shakespeare, was urbane British perfection as Charles Condomine in Blithe Spirit. Depta, so fine for Bumgarner in The Friar & the Nurse, now helped change Madame Arcati from eccentric spinster to flamboyant gypsy.