Alliance takes 7 at Suzi awards

The Alliance Theatre, metro Atlanta’s largest troupe in terms of budget and reach, dominated the 2010 Suzi Bass Awards, but several groups went home happy with multiple star-shaped trophies at the local version of the Tony Awards.

Coming in a year in which theater companies have had one hand extended for donations to pay down deficits while trimming budgets with the other, Monday night’s glossy ceremony at Oglethorpe University’s Conant Performing Arts Center felt celebratory and hardly competitive.

Still, there were prizes for 25 categories for 2009-10 season plays and musicals to be handed out, and Midtown’s Alliance hauled in seven. Suburban theaters fared particularly well, with Lawrenceville’s Aurora Theatre, Marietta’s Theatre in the Square and Marietta’s Atlanta Lyric Theatre tied for second, along with downtown Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit and westside’s Actor’s Express. Each earned three Suzis. Little Five Points’ Horizon Theatre won two. Atlanta Lyric grabbed one of the bigger plums, outstanding musical production, for “Hairspray.”

In special Suzi categories, the audience choice award for outstanding season went to Actor’s Express; Rosemary Newcott, the Alliance’s artistic director of Theatre for Youth, won the spirit of Suzi award; and Janece Shaffer was honored with the Gene-Gabriel Moore playwriting award for “Brownie Points,” produced by Theatrical Outfit.

Several of the winners addressed connections within and across the racial divide in Atlanta and the South, including “Brownie Points”; Horizon’s revival of “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery” (outstanding play production and play costume design for Nyrobi Moss); and Musical-Dramatic Arts Inc.’s “I Dream” (outstanding world premiere).

Wiping away tears, Horizon co-founder Lisa Adler told the crowd she was proud to work in a city “where black and white sit by side by side” in theater audiences and work together backstage and onstage. “That’s what Atlanta gives the world.”

“Shakin’ the Mess” was a remounting of Shay Youngblood’s sisterhood-lovin’ 1988 world premiere. “I Dream,” a musical based on the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by London barrister-turned-Atlanta-playwright Douglas Tappin, was a world premiere performed on the Alliance’s main stage.