Stage Raw’s 2023 “I’m Still Here” Awards Party

Because You Deserve It!
By Steven Leigh Morris

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Our party is a recognition tenacity and survival. The point is getting to know each other again, to meet and re-meet, and start to reimagine who we are and who we can be as a community.

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Update: Here are the Awards Recipients/Event Program.

On Monday night, April 17, 7-10 pm, Stage Raw will likely host its first awards/community party since 2019. It will probably look different from anything we’ve done before. But we are in a new era.

First, it will be at what’s for us, a new venue, the  Sassafras Saloon at 1233 N. Vine Street in Hollywood. The 1930s New Orleans-style saloon includes a bar; the living room of a house built in 1800 and relocated from Savannah, Georgia; an elevated stage for a live band and an awards ceremony; and an outdoor courtyard — a euphemism for what’s actually a decorated alley between the Saloon and the four-story apartment building next door.

It’s called the “I’m Still Here” party, channeling Stephen Sondheim’s ditty from Follies, made famous by Elaine Stritch.

Our stage community has been through what, a decade ago, would have seemed unimaginable impediments — from misguided legislation that has pummeled the field to a public health crisis. In that same decade, we’ve seen the number of local productions drop by 50%, the greatest pain being felt by the smallest companies — which have gone out of business in droves. The cost of putting on a play in a theater that holds only 50 seats has double, tripled and quadrupled, depending on the size of the cast. Small, veteran companies, such as Boston Court Performing Arts Center and Playwrights Arena, theaters that used to present a season of five plays each are now partnering to co-produce a single play in calendar year 2023.

And yet, we’re still here. Our party is a recognition of just that: tenacity and survival. The point is getting to know each other again, to meet and re-meet, and start to reimagine who we are and who we can be as a community.

A $20 ticket, which can be purchased online here, will get you in the door, plus complimentary food, a cash bar, live music, dancing, and an awards ceremony lasting no longer than an hour. If you buy a ticket online, please use the discount code StageRaw, and all ticketing fees will be waved. (Your $20 ticket will cost you $20, not $22.50, thanks to the generosity of onstage411.com. $25 tickets can be purchased at the door, but the capacity of the Saloon is only 250 people at one time, so for public safety reasons, we won’t be over-booking pre-purchased tickets, and we’ll be candid about space availability closer to the date.

For theater owners, there’s a discounted sponsorship level. All businesses and theaters, feel free to review our sponsorship levels for this party.

All proceeds will go to support Stage Raw and the ability of its journalists to continue covering the L.A. area stage scene.

The Awards (Recognizing Excellence in Calendar Year 2022)  

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We’ve remarked among ourselves that our annual event was always just a party masquerading as an awards ceremony, but this year we’ll try to live up to that standard.

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This year’s awards will honor theaters of all shapes and sizes.

Let’s start from the premise that theater is not a competitive sport. These awards will not apply metrics for best productions and performances and design elements which can be assessed like a judge scoring a gymnast’s technique. That is is just perception walking around in the clothing of science.

Rather, a production, in all its facets, passes through the nerve centers of viewers – people of different generations, and ethnicities, and experiences. And those people respond to productions for reasons that may be unrelated to standards pronounced by any person or committee. So, the very premise that this or that is the “best production” or “best performance” of the year is something of a contrivance.

To drive home this point, around 400 BCE, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King received second prize in the Athenian festival in which it premiered. So what won first prize? Nobody knows. Nobody remembers. It’s true that some 2.75 thousand years have flowed under the bridge since then; nonetheless, the historical irrelevance of what was once deemed a first-prize play encapsulates my point. There are countless other examples of this syndrome, but Oedipus the King, nabbing the mere runner-up position to a now forgotten award winner, is probably the oldest.

So, to address this re-think of how we recognize excellence, our first move has been to remove “quorums” from our metrics. Quorums are a requirement that in order for any aspect or person in a production to qualify for an award, a minimum number of people, a sub-committee, must have seen it. But — we live in a region that traverses seven counties. In the nine years of Stage Raw’s existence, and the two and half decades of awards at LA Weekly before that, with anywhere from 10 to 25 contributors viewing shows across the region, and despite our administrative pleading and nagging to bring more shows into the awards fold, we would inevitably end up voting on shows at about 12 theaters per year (ludicrously narrow), primarily because our voters, as a tribe, gravitated to the venues they felt most comfortable with.

As a result, we did not produce so much a standard of excellence as a standard of convenience and complacency — not, in my view, the best community service. Every year, I wasn’t alone among staff seething at how we’d just rebuffed gorgeous productions because those shows couldn’t get a quorum — even after the number of voters needed to qualify a production for an award grew smaller in order to redress that flaw.

And so, for a new era, a new more open-hearted system of recognition: 

In the calendar year 2022, Stage Raw covered 204 stage productions. (You can see them for yourself via the link in the prior sentence.) Each of these productions is under consideration for a Stage Raw award. Each of our contributors has been allocated a percentage of votes in proportion to the number of these shows they saw in 2022. They can vote on whatever shows or whatever element of that show most moved them, within the confines of their vote allocations. The votes have not yet been tallied but we estimate giving out 40- 50 awards, which will be announced at the awards ceremony, and can be retrieved at a designated table.

The hoped-for effect of this system is to diversify the number of companies receiving awards by honoring the generational, ethnic, gender and aesthetic diversity of our individual contributors, who will each be selecting award winners. No company will be left out of consideration because we couldn’t get five or four or three critics out to see a particular show (because of geographic or other barriers) that one of our writers expressed enthusiasm for.

There are three exceptions — three “special awards” for which our contributors can submit nominations, and these will be voted on collectively: These are the Queen of the Angels Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Playwriting Award. These three will be presented during the ceremony, which, again, we will cap at one-hour.

The remaining two hours (or more if we can keep the ceremony short) will be a “welcome back” party for eating and drinking, sharing travails and triumphs, for music and for dancing. We’ve remarked among ourselves that our annual event was always just a party masquerading as an awards ceremony, but this year we’ll try to live up to that standard.

Looking forward to seeing you on April 17!  

2023 Stage Raw “I’m Still Here” Awards Party, Sassafras Saloon, 1233 Vine St., Hlywd., Monday, April 17, 7-10 pm. Tickets here. Notes: Enter discount code StageRaw to bypass $2.50 ticketing fee; limited venue capacity.