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The 2015 Helen Hayes Award: Moving Forward!
After a 30th Anniversary marked by an awards presentation that doubled as a cocktail party and schmooze fest, this year’s Helen Hayes Awards – on April 6 – will look and feel very different. A communal thumbs-up has already been expressed for the return to a theatrical venue. In contrast to last year’s National Building Museum, this year’s event will take place at not one but two historic Washington theatres. The Awards will be presented at the Lincoln Theatre, with the after-party at the historic Howard Theatre just blocks away.
“Our biggest challenge, I think, is to present roughly twice as many awards as ever before, but we’ve been preparing for this for more than a year,” explained Board Chair Kurt Crowl, referring to a revised Awards process that honors accomplishments in parallel categories distinguished by a range of criteria. “The Awards show focuses entirely on recognizing our nominees and recipients,” Crowl pointed out. “In the process, we recognize the amazing contributions of the entire Washington theatre community.”
Crowl admits that veterans of the gala event might grow nostalgic. “The show has evolved enormously over the past three decades,” he explains. “In the earliest days we involved a lot of celebrities as the organization worked toward national recognition. Later we were able to focus more deeply on our own community, with the show featuring the best talent we’ve got, supported by our best writers and directors. Now it’s time to evolve again, as we meet the challenges that come hand-in-hand with the new excitement this year brings.”
Crowl has high praise for a theatreWashington staff that is entering uncharted waters. “There are some basic practical concerns and our team is handling them beautifully,” he says. Among other factors, the doubling of nominees results in a significant decrease in available seating. That, in turn, creates serious budget challenges. Raising ticket prices, though, was never on the table. “The cost of attending this event is lower than ever,” Crowl points out.
In the years prior to the 30th Anniversary at the National Building Museum, the Awards were celebrated at either the National or Warner Theatre in a neighborhood that has increased its theatre quotient in the last decade with the expansion of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, the renovation of Ford’s Theatre, and the building of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s Penn Quarter home. Holding the Awards at the Lincoln and Howard Theatres brings the celebration to an entirely different corner of the capital.
“The Lincoln and the Howard were the birthplace of a musical renaissance,” Crowl says, referring to performances by Washington natives Pearl Bailey and Duke Ellington, and such legends as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Sarah Vaughan. “On April 6 we’ll celebrate the theatrical renaissance we’ve experienced over the past decades. We’ve become a theatre town. We’re celebrating that fact just blocks from Source Theatre, which has been a launching pad for emerging theatre artists for as long as I can remember. We’re in the same neighborhood as Studio Theatre, a flagship of the movement, and proof that the presence of a theatre can transform a neighborhood. And we’ll be just down the street from GALA Hispanic Theatre, a company whose mission has embraced the Latino community for four decades.”
Invitations have been distributed throughout the theatre community by means of theatreWashington’s 90+ constituent theatres. “We’re looking forward to a great crowd,” Crowl says, “and to an audience ready to celebrate a year of great achievements. If you think you’ve seen the Lincoln and the Howard rock before, wait until you see them on April 6.”
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