Last Sunday night Team Cosi Fan Tutte donned their sparkly dresses and tux for the Off West End Awards at The Albany Theatre where we were a finalist for the Best Opera Production award! We were delighted so many of the original team could make it and had a fantastic night catching up on everyone’s news over champagne and canapés!
It was really exciting and humbling for us to be a finalist for this kind of award as not only does ‘fringe’ work receive less recognition than that of the bigger, more established venues, but also site-specific theatre and work that engages the community is also so very often overlooked for these kinds of awards. We cannot overstate how delighted we were with our audiences’ reactions to our high street version of Cosi last year or how pleased we were to engage so many groups in Merton, whether schools or elderly lunchclubs – but it is also very nice and very important for the profile of our company (and thus to help the company grow in the future) to be acknowledged at an industry awards ceremony.
Personally we think that our adaptation of opera for the high street – re-arranging the music from full orchestra to 3 promenade-able instruments and re-writing the libretto to be modern ‘high street’ English and with scenes being performed amongst people going about their daily lives in the pub, supermarket or library – is pretty innovative so we were delighted for this to be acknowledged at the Offies. Sadly we didn’t win the award in the end but we’re only a new company so who knows what might happen in the future!
It was also so great to see many friends and industry colleagues acknowledged with the fab Engineer Theatre up for Best Ensemble and the wonderful Orange Tree Theatre winning 3 awards! Sorry to friends we saw across the crowded room but didn’t get a chance to say hello!
So a huge thank you to the Offies Team for recognising our work as a Finalist for Best Opera Production, for a brilliantly fun awards ceremony and the fab goodie bags to take home!! And keep an eye out for us next year!
