The curtain is rising once again on one of the North Bay’s signature celebrations of stagecraft.
After a five-year hiatus, the Marquee Theater Journalists Association (MTJA) has announced the nominees for the 2025 NorBay Theater Awards. The program, which recognizes outstanding performances and productions in Sonoma and Napa counties, will be presented on Sunday, Sept. 28, at the California Theatre in Santa Rosa.
The MTJA first launched in 2015, designed as a critics’ collective to highlight excellence in local productions. The NorBay Awards had been warmly embraced during their first five years, but the program was put on hold when the pandemic hit in 2020. With some original members moving on and the theater world itself in recovery, it wasn’t feasible to continue at the time.
In the past two years, however, North Bay theater has regained its footing, and new contributors have joined Weeklys’ theater coverage. When local companies and artists expressed interest in reviving the awards, the association determined the time was right and that there were enough productions—and critics—to support a meaningful, critically-based program.
“To be honest, the local theater scene hasn’t changed that much in the last five years,” said Harry Duke, this paper’s resident theater critic and a founder of the MTJA. “We lost one company (Main Stage West in Sebastopol) and the theater program at Sonoma State University, and one company has taken their shows on the road (Cinnabar Theater), but we’ve gained a company as well (Mercury Theater in Petaluma).”
The most significant change the critic has observed is an increase in diversity both onstage and backstage. “That’s something that continues to need to be worked on. As far as how that’s reflected in the awards, they were always designed to recognize outstanding work, regardless of who is doing it or where,” Duke said. “That continues to be the goal.”
One innovation that has set the NorBays apart from the beginning is the elimination of gender distinctions in performance categories.
“That was one thing I insisted upon when we were developing the awards,” Duke explained. “Other categories like director or writer aren’t gender-specific, so why should performance categories be?”
Throughout, the voting process emphasized collaboration. Each member could submit up to five nominees per category, with the seven most-mentioned advancing to the ballot. The group then met to openly discuss the nominees, allowing critics to advocate for their picks and hear one another’s perspectives. After this exchange, the final decisions were made through ranked-choice voting.
“The members put a lot of thought into this process,” Duke observed.
As for trends in this year’s nominations, Duke noted, “Musicals continue to be the most popular genre of theater produced locally. Solo or small-cast shows were done a lot coming out of the pandemic, but there were few this past year, so we folded them into the drama category.”
The critics also expected more comedies “…to help us deal with the difficult political environment we’re living in now,” Duke suggested. “But maybe people are just finding it too difficult to laugh about anything these days.” – Weeklys Staff
The NorBay Theater Awards will be presented 6–8pm, Sunday, Sept. 28, at the California Theatre, 528 7th St., Santa Rosa. Admission is free. caltheatre.com.
