Hayes Awards Announces Nominees

The nominations for the Helen Hayes Awards, announced last night at the National Theatre, came as welcome news to numerous area theater companies -- but numbers released with the nominations indicate a dropoff in attendance.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company received 19 nominations -- one more than Signature Theatre -- for the awards, which honor Washington area theaters for shows produced last year.

The Hayes Awards organization, however, reported an 8.5 percent drop in attendance compared with 2004, as well as a decrease in the number of theater companies producing shows. In recent seasons, the usual fluctuation in attendance had been plus or minus 4 to 6 percent.

The Hayes Awards' executive director, Linda Levy Grossman, said she does not see gloom in the attendance drop because most of the decreases occurred at spaces that bring in touring shows, such as the National Theatre, the Warner Theatre and the Kennedy Center. "Eighty-two percent of those decreases occurred at theaters that traditionally present mostly non-resident work," she said.

In other words, she said, the problem is not with local theater.

"I don't know anything about the touring companies," said Jennifer L. Nelson, president of the League of Washington Theatres and artistic director of African Continuum Theatre Company. "I know only anecdotally from other theaters -- and of course from my own theater -- that pretty much across the board, people were experiencing some decline in shows," especially this past fall, she said.

According to the Hayes Awards, nine fewer local troupes were producing last year (56, compared with 65 in 2004). There also were more than 5 percent fewer performances (7,169, compared with 7,582 in 2004), and 8.5 percent fewer tickets were sold in 2005 (1,952,405) than a year earlier (2,133,731).

"This is a thing we have been talking about kind of amongst ourselves," Nelson said of those in the theater community, "but there hasn't been any kind of academic statistical data behind it."

As for the nominations, multi-nominated productions were more evenly distributed between musicals and straight plays -- a bit of a departure from past years, when musicals tended to dominate among the multiple nominees.

Signature Theatre's acidic musical "Urinetown" received a leading dozen nominations. Arena Stage's "Damn Yankees" got seven, one ahead of Ford's Theatre's "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Signature's "Pacific Overtures."

Among plays, the Shakespeare Theatre's "Othello" received eight nominations, two more than Woolly Mammoth's "The Clean House." Round House's impressionistic riff on the Columbine shootings, "columbinus," and Theater J's "Hannah & Martin" each received five.

Helen Hayes judges include theater and arts professionals, academics, "learned theatergoers" and journalists, Grossman said. In a change of policy last year, the pool of nearly 60 judges was divided into three specialized panels: One focused on new works, one on musicals and one on straight plays. Productions must run at least 16 performances to be eligible.