13th Life! Theatre Awards: The “Readers’ Choice Award”

(no prizes for guessing what our favourite pick is)

Rumours of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

The 13th Life! Theatre Awards is, in fact, still alive and well, and will be held on 1st July at the W Singapore hotel in Sentosa Cove, which is the official venue partner for this year’s awards.

And as an appetiser before the full nominees are released next Tuesday, the Life! organisers have announced a brand new category this year known as the “Readers’ Choice Award”.

Nominees are as follows:

“Company” by Dream World Productions
“La Cage aux Folles” by W!ld Rice
“Lao Jiu: The Musical 《老九》” by The Theatre Practice
“National Broadway Company” by The Esplanade
“Roots” by The Finger Players (pictured above)
“Spring Awakening” by Pangdemonium! Productions

(Voting can be done at the ST Communities website here.)

Just a few thoughts on this.

Firstly – and I don’t mean this in a sarcastic way – one can’t help but wonder what the purpose of this Readers’ Choice Award is.

It’s certainly not a quest to determine which production scored highest in terms of artistic merit, that’s for sure.

It’s probably merely a popularity contest to see which of the six productions theatre lovers liked the most last year.

And it only follows that the productions that get the highest number of votes would most likely be the ones which the most people have watched, and we can safely say that the larger-scale productions would obviously have had more attendees than, say, some small one-man play at the Drama Centre Black Box which only ran for four days.

Not to mention the fact that theatre companies with the larger social media reach would probably be able to garner more votes for their productions than the others.

Nonetheless, I applaud the Life! organisers for trying to add a bit of variety and novelty to this year’s awards.

I suppose the Readers’ Choice Award would certainly help to drum up that little bit more interest in the proceedings, and allow theatre lovers a chance to be able to get involved in the Life! Theatre Awards in their own little way.

Looking forward to the full list of awards nominees next Tuesday.