And the 2025-2026 Sterling Awards go to …, Theater News

Two high-contrast fairy tales — one a small-scale, whimsical musical love story with Fringe origins and the other a large-scale, fizzy 20-year-old Broadway musical —  proved the top choice of jurors at the 37th annual Sterling Awards bash hosted by real-life couple Kristi Hansen and Sheldon Elter at the Fringe’s Westbury Theatre Monday night.

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Named for the Edmonton theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, the awards celebrate the season just past on Edmonton stages.

The Fringe Theatre revival of Countries Shaped Like Stars, which created its theatre magic from imaginative low-tech ingenuity with a ladder, a whirly-wind, and lamps, is the season’s Outstanding Production. Murray Utas’s production got the Sterling nod over four nominated Citadel offerings, including Casey and Diana, Cyrano de Bergerac, Death of a Salesman, and Life of Pi.

The jurors gave Outstanding Musical honours to the Citadel/Theatre Calgary collaboration on Legally Blonde, a popsicle-hued showbiz explosion directed by Stephanie Graham, with a Sterling for Rachel Cameron’s musical direction.

Andrew Cecon and Scott Shpeley in Cyrano de Bergerac, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

It was a new play, though, Jessy Ardern’s exuberant verse-filled adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, which premiered at the Citadel in a three-way co-production with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and the Grand Theatre, directed by Amanda Goldberg, that took home the most Sterlings, five in all, of its 11 nominations. So, Outstanding New Play honours for playwright Ardern in a competitive category that included plays by Louise Casemore, Greg MacArthur, Nicole Moeller, and Hayley Moorhouse — as well as Sterlings for Goldberg’s direction, Hugh Conacher’s dramatic lighting, Beyata Hackborn’s artfully deconstructed set (she now has a Sterling twin to match last year’s for The Play That Goes Wrong), and lavish period costumes by Deanna Finnman.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre, Found Fest 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

Casemore’s Lucky Charm, a séance held by Bess Houdini, the widow of the world’s most famous escapologist as she attempts to summon the spirit of her late husband, took home the Independent Production Sterling.

The acting awards, divided between musicals and straight plays, all went to performances in Citadel productions. The Sterlings for both leading and supporting performances in a musical went to Vinyl Cafe The Musical, one for Mike Nadajewski for his starring capture of the affable, ruefully hapless Dave; the other for Nadien Chu’s supporting performance as Dave’s officious neighbour nemesis Mary.

The cast of Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

It was a double-Sterling night for Chu. She took home as well the leading performance in a play award for her unusually fierce performance as Willy Loman’s steadfast wife Linda in Death of a Salesman, the only Sterling for the Daryl Cloran revival of a play first produced by the Citadel in its inaugural season 60 years ago. The Sterling for outstanding supporting performance in a play went to Helen Knight for her work as the central character’s aggressive guilt-ridden sister in Casey and Diana, the sole award for Lana Michelle Hughes’ production.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The two Sterlings for Hasam Kadri’s Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of Life of Pi went to Dayna Tietzen’s puppetry direction (puppets designed and built by Puppet Stuff Canada) and Corwin Ferguson’s stunning multi-media design. Colleen Dauncy and Akiva Romer-Segal’s score for Vinyl Cafe gained this Canadian song-writing team a Sterling.

In all the Citadel took home Sterlings in 14 of 20 mainstage categories. The only awards received by mid-sized companies were for Teatro Live!’s The 39 Steps and Shadow Theatre’s An Iliad — equally impressive for the small size of their cast (and the theatrical savvy thus required for the storytelling). The outstanding ensemble honours went to Farren Timoteo’s high-speed Teatro production of The 39 Steps, in which four actors (assisted by four trunks, four chairs, a ladder and a moveable door) re-created the Hitchcock homage cum spoof of John Buchan’s intricate 1915 spy thriller.

Katie Yoner and Michael Watt in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Composer/musician Erik Mortimer, who led the Sterling gala band from the keyboard, now has a Sterling for his crucial sound design for An Iliad. In that time-travelling solo (!) re-retelling of the Homer epic, he played live onstage as the Muse to the Poet (Sterling-nominated actor Michael Peng).

And the Sterling for outstanding individual achievement in production went to the Varscona Theatre’s versatile production manager Tiana McLean.

The Fringe Sterlings were dispersed among four productions chosen from amongst the 223 productions at last summer’s festival: “SPEED” A 1940s Radio Production by Jesse Harlton and Andrew Boyd was both Outstanding Fringe Production and Outstanding Fringe New Work; Undiscovered Country, created by and starring Chris Bullough garnered him Outstanding Fringe Performance By An Individual; Uniform Theatre’s production of the Sondheim musical Assassins was deemed the outstanding Fringe ensemble; Jim Guedo received the Outstanding Fringe Director award for his production of Beth Graham and Nathan Cuckow’s tightly wound Victorian thriller Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things.

Both Sterlings in the Theatre for Young Audiences category went to Concrete Theatre’s Celestial Being one for outstanding production and the other, outstanding artistic achievement, for Ximena Pinilla’s set and prop design.

As previously announced, the creative and resourceful Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart received the Margaret Mooney Award for excellence in administration, which she accepted in a speech of particular eloquence, an ode to her community and its artists. Geoff Bacchus is the recipient of the Ross Hill Award for achievement in production. Top Sterling honours, for a multi-faceted lifetime contribution to Edmonton theatre (complete with documentary video), went to John Hudson, retiring after three decades as Shadow Theatre’s co-founding artistic director, and a major player in the Varscona Theatre rebuild.

Congratulations to all the Sterling nominees, the recipients, and to everyone who worked so hard this past season, against formidable odds, to make live theatre happen in exciting ways in Edmonton. We celebrate all of you.

And the Sterling Awards went to …

Outstanding Production of a Play: Countries Shaped Like Stars (Fringe Theatre)