GREEN ROOM WINNERS

The English musical Billy Elliot and the Sydney Theatre Company production of Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla are the big winners in this year’s Green Room awards.
Billy Elliot won six awards, including best production, best choreography (Peter Darling), best direction for its creator, Stephen Daldry, and best male artist for the five boys who play the schoolboy lead. Melbourne’s other big production, Wicked, won four awards, including best costumes.
The creator of Shane Warne, the Musical, Eddie Perfect, won the award for best new Australian musical.
The Season at Sarsaparilla, presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company, won seven of the nine awards in the theatrical companies category, including best production, best direction for Benedict Andrews, and best female and male performers, Pamela Rabe and Peter Carroll.
Opera Australia’s Arabella and Victorian Opera’s The Coronation of Poppea, shared the award for best opera production, with Arabella winning four other awards, including best direction (John Cox) and best leading female (Cheryl Barker).
No best-production award was presented in dance, but the best performer awards went to the Australian Ballet’s Marc Cassidy for A Suite of Dances and Sarah-Jayne Howard for Sydney Dance’s Inuk 2.
The peer-judged Green Room Awards for excellence in cabaret, dance, drama, musical theatre and opera began in 1982.
SOURCE: The Age