Elly Nominations Announced At City College

Left: OK, let's make this process simpler by announcing who's not going to get an Elly nomination....















John made a good suggestion, which was to make my standard pro forma announcement before offering any opinions:

Marc Valdez, not Davis Musical Theatre Company (DMTC), is responsible for the content of this Web Site.

OK, now that the formalities are out of the way, let's begin....

I was in an increasingly peevish frame of mind by the time I finally sat down in the audience at City College - hot, sweaty, twigs-in-the-hair, and late.

In my travel around the campus, I missed the front door to the theater (at the instant I passed by, it was closed and darkened). I met three young ladies who were similarly perplexed and by happenstance I sent them off in the right direction (meanwhile, I circled the theater in the opposite direction and had to slip past a fence and other obstacles to make the complete circuit around the entire building). Plus, the drama with my father's health appears to be escalating, making this annual, penny-ante bragging-rights ritual appear increasingly trivial in comparison.

Apparently DMTC got a few nominations early on, of a technical nature (e.g., light design, set design), but by the time I sat down, with more of the artistic (e.g., acting, music, etc.) nominations being announced, it was the same old story with DMTC - no nominations.

Something inside of me snapped......

It would be one thing if the absence of nominations was something of a quirk, but it isn't: DMTC has received few Elly Award nominations of any sort since 2002, and almost no acting or music nominations at all. It would also be understandable if DMTC quality lagged behind that of other companies, but it doesn't (or at least it doesn't lag so far behind as to explain the dearth of nominations). No, something else is afoot, something beyond stiffer competition, with more theater companies participating than ever, in the Ellys.

Factions at DMTC have tried over the years to withdraw the company from the Elly Awards process. The withdrawers have argued the Elly Awards process is inimical to community theater in general and that the judges have an anti-DMTC bias.

In contrast, I have argued that it is important to keep DMTC engaged in the process and that nothing useful would be served by withdrawing. At times, my voice was pivotal. For seven years I have maintained this position even as evidence accumulated of an anti-DMTC bias at SARTA (and not just DMTC - other theater companies suffer in silence too). Seven long, almost-fruitless years.

Well, I'm done. Farewell to that defense. This is a community, after all. I'm tired of supporting these SARTA parasites who do little for community theater except take time, attention, and money from designated victims in order to curry favor with those they prefer to bless.

If there has been a modus operandi to the Ellys, it has been that of continued expansion, pulling in more and more new theater companies, and leaving older ones in the dark. Well and good, if the purpose is to encourage the young. But who says there aren't young performers at older theater companies (or older performers at newer theater companies) anyway?

What if the real purpose of the Ellys is similar to that of a Ponzi Pyramid, where only the ones at the top, the very-well-connected, benefit, but in order to keep the process going newbies have to be brought in all the time? So, perhaps it is better to say not that SARTA has an anti-DMTC bias - SARTA may have no feelings for DMTC one way or the other - but rather that it is not the function of DMTC in SARTA's pyramidal plan to secure Elly nominations. That used to be DMTC's function. That function is now reserved for others. DMTC's current role in the plan is purely that of support. Elly Award nominations for DMTC would be wasted, when they could be used instead to further expansion of the pyramid.

In any event, it's not a fair process. Like I say, I'm done.

As always:

Marc Valdez, not Davis Musical Theatre Company (DMTC), is responsible for the content of this Web Site.