— पांच हजार नौ सौ दो —
Last night was the
Gregory Awards, celebrating local and regional live theater over the previous year, for the first time held at
Town Hall Seattle. I had forgotten they changed the venue; Theatre Puget Sound is based at Seattle Center, and last year they held it there, at the Center Theatre on the lower level of the Armory building. This year's change made the location a lot easier and quicker to just walk to, all of one mile or about a 20-minute walk from home. (Seattle Center is double that distance.)
Last year's ceremony, as it happens, was the first they had since before the pandemic. The first couple of years' break, 2020 and 2021, were obviously due to stay-home orders and then the long tail of economic fallout from that; the way Shobhit tells it, the next couple of years hampered by lingering effects of
Board turmoil in the mid-late 2010s, the legal fallout of which continues to cause some logistical frustrations even now. It's pretty easy to deduce, however, that the four years without any Gregory Awards ceremony had more to do with
the economic fallout of covid, which had TPS facing closure in late 2023 due to the botton falling out of local theatre-supported revenue. That January 2024
Seattle Times article makes it clear that some other factors contributed to the "miracle" of saving the organization from obliteration, but I think Shobhit has been instrumental in sustaining that momentum on a financial front, having first been the Treasurer on the TPS Board, and now being their part-time
Finance Manager.
This is where Shobhit's exciting news of recently being offered the lead part in
The Foreigner staged by Harlequin Productions at the State Theatre in Olympia comes a bit full circle: Harlequin was both a nominee
and a winner at last night's ceremony; the
guy who accepted the award—his name is Aaron—also happens to be the director of the play. There was another woman from Harlequin at the ceremony that I met at the reception beforehand, but I don't remember her name; I only remember Aaron because I was able to Google it.
Shobhit is sort of incapable of being optimistic about anything, but I feel like just about everything in his life is going in the right direction for the first time in ages. He had felt stuck in retail work for a solid eight years from the time he returned from Los Angeles in late 2016 until he made the clearly right decision to quit his job at Total Wine & More just before Christmas last year. And now? He makes nearly as much per month as the TPS Finance Manager working part time as he did working over 30 hours a week on minimum wage at Total Wine; his has a finance job at an arts organization—a perfect intersection for Shobhit if ever there was one—
and has now involved in not one, but two plays between this fall and next spring: he's got a small part in and is directing one of the short plays as part of "
It's About DAMN Time in November—and I already have tickets for Alexia and me to see that one together—and he's booked in the lead part of
The Foreigner at a theater in downtown Olympia in March. To me, this is the most exciting turn in Shobhit's life in the arts since his last small part in a wide-release movie, and that was in 2013.
Shobhit spends a lot of time just wishing he were making more money. The way I see it, making less money but doing something he loves is far better than making more money doing something that makes him miserable—which was the scenario he left behind when he left Microsoft in 2010 to pursue acting. That didn't pan out in the end, but he's headed toward a very workable kind of compromise scenario right now.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ दो —
— पांच हजार नौ सौ दो —
Anyway. I was much more intentional with my camera at the Gregory Awards this year than I was last year. Last year, I took
only ten photos at the event. Granted, part of this could have been that Shobhit had been with them a bit less time, plus I wasn't quite as familiar as I am now.
That said, the event his year was more photogenic on many levels, including the venue change to a classic old Seattle building; better decor at a pre-event reception; and particularly some very cool stage performances that were not done at all last year. This included
a dance by host Jimmy Sheilds with a troupe of backup dancers to kick off the ceremony, and several performances from local stage productions. The best of these was from a play Agastya helped produce, called
House of Joy, which I really wish now that I could have seen. The play got a ton of nominations and did not win all of them, but did still win a bunch, certainly more wins than any other production of the night—although the key one it lost was "Outstanding Production - Play." Oh well.
Just like last year, every time anyone won, the audience went apeshit. This was especially the case every time
House of Joy won, making it clearly the most popular play with this audience, but it happened with every win. This is the beauty of an event like this, especially one that celebrates locak theater specifically: they're all incredibly supportive of each other. Just being there was an infectiously positive experience.
It's not lost on either Shobhit or me that by the Gregory Awards
next year, Shobhit will actually qualify for a nomination. If that play goes particularly well, it won't even be an unrealistic proposition. So, one thing at a time I guess: hopefully the production does indeed go well. The play sounds really compelling to me:
The Foreigner involves an Englishman who visits the U.S. and pretends to be an exotic foreigner who cannot understand English. Casting Shobhit, who actually
is a foreigner (I mean, he's literally a U.S. citizen and has been since 2010, but you know what I mean), should be an interesting twist. I wonder if they'll present it as though we're supposed to think of him as actually English or what.
It's basically a foregon conclusion at this point that Shobhit and I will attend the Gregory Awards next year. Whether or not he'll be there as a nominee is where my high hopes lie at the moment.
The auditorium, or "Great Hall" at Town Hall has a far higher capacity than the Center Theatre does, like four times as much (over 800 vs 195), which means that even though the Great Hall was hardly filled to capacity, the crowd was still way bigger than it had been last year. Shobhit commented that they had done a really good job of promoting it and getting a bunch of sponsors for the event. This is all great news for them.
Shobhit does still get slightly over-eager at times, though. Doors opened at 6:00 but we were there at about 5:45. Only official volunteers were allowed inside before 6, and Shobhit asked more than one of them if they wanted him to come inside; he was consistently told no—always politely, to their credit. Once inside, Shobhit did a fair amount of mingling while I kind of meandered around. I did get a couple compliments on my earrings, as I was wearing my
Dia de Muertos cats I got at the festival at Seattle Center last year.
I ate way too much. There were snack tables with crackers and cheese and some sweets, and I had two small plates piled with stuff. Shobhit and I stopped at Hot Mamma's Pizza on our walk home and we each got a slice; I really did not need that. I weighed in at just under 169 lbs this morning. Bleh. There were also tiny cups of champaigne on a table that were probably meant for VIP guests, which we were not, but they were basically unguarded and easy to take from. I had three of them. In my defense, each of them was filled with all of about half an inch of chanpagne.
I mostly walked around looking for things to get photos of. I took six shots of the exterior of the Town Hall building (that alone got me to 60% of the number of photos I took last year); 9 shots in the reception area; and a surprising 15 shots during the actual ceremony—6 of
those being of the
House of Joy group. That got me to a total of 30 shots for
this year's photo album, triple the number I took last year. I did something I rarely do anymore these days and actually wrote captions on every photo, so you can go there for further details.
It's too bad they always do this on a Monday night, and the ceremony lasts three hours from 7:30 to 10:30. I got to bed pretty late last night. But it was worth it. I had a good time.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ दो —
[posted 12:42pm]
*The Gregory Awards "began life" in 1998—27 years ago—as the Gregory A. Falls Sustained Achievement Award, but turned into a broader "Gregory Awards" as of 2009—16 years ago—and had official hiatus in 2020, 2021 and 2022. If they regard the 8 awards given out in 2023 as their "23rd annual special event," then adding the 2024 and 2025 ceremonies would make the math add up to 25.