Will There Be an Ovation Award for Best Webcast?

When the annual Ovation Awards are passed out Monday, fewer people will be on hand than in the recent past. Although the event is sold out, this year’s venue for awarding the peer-judged theatrical honors is the 1,264-seat La Mirada Theatre instead of the 2,139-seat Shubert Theatre in Century City, where the event attracted big crowds for the past three years.

By holding the event near the southeastern boundary of Los Angeles County in a recently renovated theater that has won Ovations in the past, the sponsoring organization, Theatre LA, is attempting to highlight the geographic diversity of the L.A. theater community.

If you can’t get in to the ceremony because of the smaller hall, however, there is a second-best alternative. In fact, in contrast to earlier years, when the only electronic coverage of the Ovations was on obscure cable companies, this year the festivities will be available to a huge potential audience, thanks to the Web.

In a pilot program that may eventually lead to live Webcast coverage of future Ovations ceremonies, Theatre LA will tape a behind-the-scenes look at the Ovation ceremony. The plan is to make the quickie news report available on https://www.theatrela.org, the Web site for Theatre LA, as early as Tuesday morning, alongside the winners’ names.

The Webcast will even have a celebrity host--sometime L.A. stage actor Bill Brochtrup, perhaps better known as the precinct aide John Irvin on “NYPD Blue.” He’ll be the Web-watcher’s guide to the event, starting with the arrivals, continuing with backstage interviews of the winners and concluding with departures.

One thing is missing from that list, of course: coverage of the actual awards ceremony itself. Union agreements haven’t yet been worked out that would govern a live broadcast of the entire event--hence the scaled-back coverage around the sidelines.

The coverage will be available only to those who download the latest edition of Apple Computer’s free QuickTime software from the Apple Web site. The intrepid Web-watcher will then use that software to access the coverage via the Theatre LA Web site. Directions on the Theatre LA Web site will help guide the electronically challenged. If you want to do a test run, you can go to Theatre LA’s Web site now and witness videotaped highlights of the ceremony where the Ovations nominations were announced.

Spearheading the project for Theatre LA is Brian Kite, a Buffalo Nights Theatre Company member who also designs Web sites.

NOT QUITE SO TONY: This year’s Ovations ceremony will have a somewhat different mood, said first-time producer Farrell Hirsch. “We won’t be quite so ‘Tony Awards.’ My sensibility is a little less elegant.”

One big change is that most of the live musical numbers will represent currently running musicals instead of those nominated for the musical awards. Because only one of the nominated musicals, “Reefer Madness,” is still running, it will be the only one of the nominees from which an excerpt is performed.

“In the past, we let things up on the stage that hadn’t been rehearsed lately,” Hirsch said. He believes that by drawing only from currently running shows or ones that will open soon, not only will the performances be more polished, but “if you love a number, you can go out and buy a ticket. It’ll raise the profile of what’s going on right now.”

Couldn’t the attention paid to current or future shows give them an unfair boost in next year’s competition? Hirsch acknowledged this issue had been raised; his only response is to point out that the people who picked the performances for this year’s Ovation show--primarily director Michael Michetti--aren’t Ovation voters.

Hirsch is a big booster of the Ovations, and he uses some of his statistics about the Ovations to justify his retreat from the Tony Awards model. He pointed out that 284 productions were registered for this year’s competition, including 100 world premieres. “How many years do you have to go back to find a year when there were 100 premieres eligible for the Tony Awards?” he asked.

Although Hirsch has attended the Tonys and other theater awards ceremonies in Paris, Washington and Chicago, as well as the Ovations, he has never seen the annual LA Weekly theater awards ceremony, but he has heard about how lively it often is. “People come out of it saying they had a great time, while too often people come out of the Ovations saying, ‘This is good for theater in L.A.’ Not that I want to lose that, but I do want this to be the most entertaining Ovation show ever.”

THE SOUND GUY: John Zalewski set a record this year for most Ovation nominations for an individual in a single year. He nabbed three of the five nods for best sound design in a small production, plus one in the larger show category. Also nominated last year, his failure to win was almost a relief, he said, because of his stage fright. This year, he said, “the odds are slimmer that I’m going to squeak by without giving an acceptance speech.”