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Each year, through the Tom Hendry Awards, the Playwrights Guild of Canada recognizes excellence in new works for the theatre.
There are awards for one-act plays, dramas, comedies, musicals, and plays for young audiences.
This year’s nominees for The Dan School of Drama & Music Musical Award include Beautiful Scars, which was co-written by Shaun Smyth, a graduate of the University of Alberta who received his career start through Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival of New Plays. Calgary audiences will remember Smyth’s award-winning performances in ATP’s Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story, and Theatre Calgary’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Smyth collaborated with Juno Award-winning Indigenous musician Tom Wilson to use Wilson’s novel Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home as the basis of a musical. Beautiful Scars details the trauma Wilson experienced when, at age 57, he learned the woman he thought was his cousin was his mother, and, though raised in a white household, he was Indigenous. Their jukebox musical, using Wilson’s original songs, premiered in April at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton.
Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s blockbuster musical Come From Away, which is to open in Calgary on Sept. 17, is a former winner of the Dan School of Drama & Music Musical Award.
Former Calgary actor and writer Makambe K. Simamba is nominated for this year’s Dorothy Lees-Blakey Award for Theatre for Young People for her play Recipe for Change. The premise is two young children’s world changes after they move from a big city in Zambia to a small town in Ontario, and recently lost their mother. The children try to create a special present for their grieving father. Simamba is currently in Calgary performing her award-winning solo show Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers at the Big Secret Theatre in Arts Commons.
The Tom Hendry Awards gala will be held Oct. 28 at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto.