This being awards season, it's nice to temper all the movie accolades with a homegrown theater award. The Glickman Award, presented each year to the best play that had its world premiere in the Bay Area, comes with a $4,000 cash prize and the honor of having your work set alongside other Glickman winners like Tony Kushner, Denis Johnson and Octavio Solis.

This year's winner is...

Consider the last couple years in the life of local director Mike Ward. He received a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award nomination for best director and he was nominated for the prestigious Ockrent Fellowship for Broadway. Oh, and he almost died several times. Ward says he had a “white light” experience during what he calls his...

Last week, Jo Schuman Silver, producer of Steve Silver’s Beach Blanket Babylon, awarded the annual Scholarships for the Arts from the Steve Silver Foundation and Beach Blanket Babylon, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this season. From nine high school senior finalists — three in each category of dance, acting and voice — three were selected...

The American Theatre Critics Association has selected E.M. (Ellen) Lewis’ Song of Extinction to receive the 2009 Harold and Mimi Steinberg /ATCA New Play Award. The announcement was made April 4 at Actors Theatre of Louisville during the Humana Festival of New American Plays. The award includes a plaque and a cash prize of $25,000 –the largest national award for...

This Sunday, the Tony Awards will be handed out. Here’s what you need to know (and get busy organizing your Tony party — we’ve got to get those dismal ratings out of the basement so CBS will continue broadcasting the darn things). For the first time, there will be pre-ceremony Tony Concert chock full of juicy musical numbers from all the nominated...

After San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom took his foot out of his mouth (he made an inappropriate comment about gay marriage), and after former SF Mayor Willie Brown introduced a film clip, and after the Beach Blanket Babylon cast throttled a song from Wicked, the Beach Blanket Babylon Scholarship for the Arts competition got under way and did what it has been doing...