My First Dora Awards

The opening number featuring Peter Fernandes- I was not prepared for it to be such a big show!

Because I will never again have my first Dora Awards, I am writing my thoughts and feelings down! It’s just for fun really but I hope you might like it.

The most important thing that happened at the Dora Mavor Moore Awards last night were the three calls to divest from the Azrieli Foundation.

Calling for this divestment is necessary and to the artists who said so as well as the artists who called out Free Palestine, thank you for using your space to give voice to the victims of this genocide. Thank you to all who wore keffiyehs as well.

On a personal level- I am so astounded that the two shows I did last season were both nominated in multiple categories. I am barely scratching the surface of the Toronto theatre scene and yet I am attending the biggest awards ceremony as a nominee? Hardly seems real.

Speaking of the word “nominee”- my name does not appear on any of the nominee announcements or the certificates we brought home. It feels wrong to consider myself a nominee because of this. However it is also true that both Les Zinspirées 12: Le Nombre Sublime and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee were Stage Managed by me. It’s a department head position. It’s an important position. It’s a position that is impossible to give awards to because no one but the team in the room will ever know or understand what we contributed to a project. So I claim that I am part of our win or loss on the production front because that is the closest I can reasonably get. I feel a mix of pride and humility- proud of course of the show and the people involved- humility because who am I to take up this space? And yet, there is no other space for me. So I will take it, and share it with all the other people who contributed to making our productions “outstanding”.

To Les Zinspirées 12, who was nominated 5x and did not win: merci infiniment. This show challenged me deeply but when we got to the run I was amazed by all we had accomplished every time I watched it. I learned so much from the incredible ensemble of actors, who were so gracious with me when the inevitable unexpecteds of making a show came about. I learned so much from the writers, both the teens and their coaches, whose voices absolutely inspired us and their audiences to think more deeply about our world while being uproariously funny. I learned so much from the entire team at Theatre Français de Toronto who were so brave to take a chance on me as a Stage Manager. It was my biggest contract to date and I hope to outdo myself on the next one. I learned so much from our designers, who helped me get through a lot of technical elements I had simply never done before, having been only in smaller stages and untrained. I learned so much from Karen, my left hand (because that’s where she sat in the booth), who frequently saved the show from my short circuiting brain when stuff was happening. I learned so much from our directing team and I am particularly grateful to Vincent for saying that he wanted me on the project in the first place- a great friend and a great human who for some reason has always believed in me ferociously.  And all of us learned immensely from Jezebel Bardot- drag Fridays was beyond just a rehearsal, it was a chance to deeply reflect on who we are, why we do what we do, and how the world operates. To get to the end of our show with all of our actors in full drag sometimes twice a day not only impacted all of us on the team deeply but clearly resonated with our audience of teens and pre-teens and there was nothing more fun that to hear them ROAR and sing along to “ce coeur, c’est a moi, ce corps, c’est a moi, ce drame, c’est a moi, tout cela, c’est a moi!”

Our nomination photo, which is just the show poster, but everyone had to look at it!

My deepest wish was for some of us to get on that stage last night to, at the very least, pronounce the name of the show well. I was pretty astounded by the struggles the presenters seemed to have with reading the names they were given. Did they not know beforehand what they were going to read? And no one is obligated to speak other languages or have my exact interpretation of good pronunciation- but if a show or artist is supposedly being celebrated, can we say their names without stuttering, tripping over it, having to start over and try again, or straight up adding/dropping parts of the name because it is unfamiliar? If we are celebrating that person or show we should GET familiar. That is respect.

Les Zinspirées and Theatre Français de Toronto should be immensely proud of their five nominations, but even more, they should be proud that they brought a show to a young audience that excited them, inspired them, amazed them, and changed them. Almost always, the entire cast would come out for the talkback segment at the end, and always, the show had a huge impact on the audience and they shared it with us in many different questions, comments, and stories.

The Spelling Bee creative team winning our first award of the night. Director Jennifer Walls at the mic, choreographer Nicholas Rocque and (first time!!!) music director Michael Ippolito stand behind her.

To The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, who was nominated 4x and won 3x- HOLY. SHIT. I fully did not expect that a first-time nominated company would be one of the biggest winners of the night. Not that I didn’t believe in the show, but against the other nominees from the likes of Canadian Stage, Musical Stage Co and Soulpepper? Us, a group of emerging artists who made a few hundred bucks apiece? I’m astounded and grateful.

Speaking of a few hundred bucks- because I was only the rehearsal stage manager due to being offered a film contract out of the blue, I gave my share back to the company so they could pay for my replacement, who then was able to have an assistant as well. So I literally worked on the show for free. I am not resentful of this fact, as everyone in the company made HUGE financial sacrifice to make it happen. But I wanted to highlight it because not everyone can do it for free. I had to leave to make money when the opportunity came. Making art is a fucking privilege. It doesn’t mean it isn’t hard or worthy or any of the other wonderful things it is, but we have to recognize that the industry is built on people who are not being compensated for all that they do, who either have to get money elsewhere or go without. And that’s hard. If you’re feeling like you have fewer opportunities because you never have the time to dedicate to your craft because you have to work: yes. I literally paid for an acting class that I will no longer be able to do because I have to go make money. I had to leave this show- and leave behind my chance to call a musical, which I was really really hoping to learn how to do- because I desperately needed the money. It makes it harder to feel like a part of the celebration because I left, I didn’t do the run. Who am I to claim a part of this win? And yet, did I give them a month or so of my time for free and do all the things a stage manager does within that time? Also yes. So that’s where I’m at with it: a part and not a part.

Spelling Bee is a very special show. I’m really glad that our creative team trio won in their category because the synergy of Jeni, Nick, and Mike was fucking magical. The show flowed so amazingly well and there was so much fun and joy in it. I fell in love with musical theatre over and over again at rehearsals. And as I told the cast on one of my last days of rehearsal- they’re all so talented. Everyone has a chance to shine in the show and all of you did. Congratulations to you DORA AWARD WINNERS! Special shout out to our swings Marie and Joey who learned THE WHOLE SHOW!!

Thank you to Shifting Ground Collective for making space for neurodivergent artists, like me. We all received accommodations from the company that kept our mental health healthier. And rehearsals are more fun and productive with fidget toys!!!

Thank you to our design teams for doing so much with so little. The show looked and sounded absolutely amazing.

Thank you especially to Liam for taking over from me and absolutely crushing it. I love getting to work with and learn from other Stage Managers and even though we only overlapped for a few days I definitely learned things from you!!

The Shifting Ground Collective for Spelling Bee all on stage accepting the Dora for Outstanding Musical Theatre Production. 21 first time Dora Award winners in this photo.

And to bring it home, I want to thank everyone last night who shouted out their stage managers and stage managers in general because as I said above, it’s not possible to give us an award based on watching the show. But it’s a really hard job! The show simply doesn’t happen if the stage manager doesn’t exist. So I will count these wins and nominations as including me and try to uplift my collaborators even higher because y’all, we made some fucking amazing shows!

Highlight of the night was being backstage as Mahabharata came in after their Outstanding Production win. We all started shouting congratulations at each other, which then devolved into total chaos of everyone shouting and jumping, which then culminated in unity of all of us jumping up and down and singing Olé Olé Olé.

I simply can’t believe that I got to this place at this stage of my career. It feels too early and undeserved. It feels surreal knowing that something that was an idle fantasy when I was leaving theatre school (trust me I’ve imagined what it would be like to win every single award across Canada) sorta actually kinda just happened.

FREE PALESTINE. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.

Me smiling at my friend and Shifting Ground co-founder Joshua as several of us on stage cry and say “oh my God” and cannot hear a single word that he is saying into the microphone.