Ottawa didn't look much like a hockey town at the Atomic Rooster on the night the city's theatre community poured into the Bank Street bar to hear the nominations for the 2010 Prix Rideau Awards.
The awards, now in their fifth year, celebrate locally produced professional theatre in both English and French. Shows are self-submitted and reviewed by a jury of peers. This year, 41 English and 15 French plays were submitted and eligible for nomination.
For first-time nominee Dave Dawson, the experience is gratifying.
"I've been working on the fringes of professional theatre in Ottawa for 10, 15 years and to at least have someone acknowledge that I exist is nice." says Dawson, who directed the Fringe Festival show The Last Goddamned Performance Piece and was nominated for Outstanding Fringe Production
But not everything is rosy in the Ottawa theatre community. While some ventures flourished, others went down in flames. Most notably, The Gladstone theatre on Preston and Gladstone, whose Radio Play was nominated for Outstanding Adaptation, was put up for sale. Owner Steve Martin told the Ottawa Citizen in October, “This city probably is a hockey city more than a theatre city. People support the Senators and they won't support live theatre. That's unfortunate, but it is what it is.”
Alvina Ruprecht, long-time theatre reviewer who works for CBC and is a founding member of the Capital Critics Circle, a group for professional arts critics in Ottawa, says the problem lies not so much with audiences, but with the media.
"The professional media, the big daily papers and the radio are not covering theatre as much as they should be," she says. "A lot of people don't bother with blogs, but people read the mainstream media and they listen to the CBC. If they don't hear about it, they don't know about it."
Dawson agrees."There's a lot of people who aren't aware that we actually have theatre going on," he says. "Bloggers are fine if you want your friends to go."
The Ottawa Citizen's Patrick Langston writes a monthly theatre column and reviews of professional theatre. The majority of the paper's theatre coverage is devoted to the Cappies, which are the high school drama reviews. The Ottawa Sun entertainment writer Denis Armstrong includes theatre listings on his blog, but the paper does not have a regular theatre critic.
Where traditional media has failed, new media strives to fill the gap. Arts and culture blogs such as Ottawa Tonite and Apartment 613, along with countless personal blogs among theatre lovers, now make up the majority of buzz around Ottawa theatre.
Heather Marie Connors is not just the Anglophone administrator on the steering committee for the Prix Rideau Awards, but a member of the thriving online theatre community as well. She hosts a podcast called Ottawa Theatre Confidential, released on iTunes every two weeks, reviewing plays and discussing the business of theatre in Ottawa.
"Non-traditional media can create a two-way conversation in a way that traditional media cannot," she says. "Artists can get a better handle on who is coming, why they come and also what they do and do not enjoy."
For its part, the Prix Rideau Awards tries to add to that conversation, Connors says, by bringing attention to excellence in theatre.
"Every time I hear someone express their excitement about a show they loved that is nominated, or question a particular nomination because it's not something they would have picked, I feel proud that the awards program has an impact."
The awards will be given out at a gala ceremony on April 10 at La maison du citoyen in Gatineau.