Off Broadway Obie Awards To Ditch Annual Ceremony In Favor Of Winner Grants, Ending 68-Year Tradition
deadline.comThe Obie Awards, the venerable honors for outstanding Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway productions, is doing away with its annual ceremony and will instead use the funds to provide winners with grants ranging from $1,000-$5,000.
Heather Hitchens, the president and CEO of the American Theatre Wing, which presents the Obies, called the grants a new path forward for the awards, saying the move “genuinely reflects the ethos of the Awards as well as the Off & Off Off Broadway movements – which is to continuously evolve and meet the moment.” Select winners of this year’s 67th Obie Awards will be announced Saturday on New York’s Spectrum News NY1 as a special presentation of the channel’s On Stage program hosted by Frank DiLella.
The special airs at 7:30 p.m./ET. “The grants and our relationship with Spectrum News NY1 will provide meaningful support, and more effective, nationwide promotion for these incredible artists, innovators, and theater companies,” Hitchens said.
The awards ceremony has not traditionally been televised. The Obies were created by the Village Voice shortly after the newspaper’s inception in 1955, and have become a significant New York tradition and perhaps the most important booster of the city’s non-Broadway theater scene, essentially the Off Broadway counterpart to Broadway’s Tony Awards.
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