MTM:UK Edinburgh Festival Fringe Musical Theatre Awards

MTM:UK Awards 2009 - The 2009 Criteria

• Presented by professional or aspiring professional groups. This can include university or student groups where it is demonstrated that the intent of the key participants is to develop careers in the Musical Theatre business professionally.
• Must be playing in Wk 2 of the Festival, and must be playing across at least 2 weeks of the Festival for a minimum of 4 performances in each week.
• Must be registered with the Fringe Office as a bone-fide company.
• MTM will check the eligibility of all shows displayed in the Fringe programme in the Musicals and Opera section. Outside of this, MTM can only make its best efforts to find other eligible shows within the programme. It is the responsibility of groups which this affects to ensure that MTM:UK organisers are aware, by July 15^th, that the show could be eligible for assessment.
• The work must be considered a “musico-dramatic work”  by the Organisers. This will be a subjective opinion and will probably exclude plays with songs, or revues without dramatic plot. It will assess the work in terms of our subjective view that the work is destined for development into a professional Musical Theatre market (not necessarily the West End).
• Tickets must be made available to the assessors at no cost to allow up to 3 people to attend in the preliminary round before the shortlisting, and a further 3 people to attend during Week 3.

• The work must not have been performed in front of a paying audience more than 15 times anywhere in the world.
• The work must be, in the opinion of MTM:UK, intended and appropriate for further productions in other parts of the UK.

NOTES

The organisers reserve the right to include a work in the assessment list, even if it is not presented by a professional company, where it is clear that the presenters are championing a new aspiring writer.

Works eligible just for the Best Musical Production can be from the existing canon of works, or be a work which has had more than 15 performances, however once again MTM:UK sees its role as celebrating innovation and exciting new creativity, and so the assessor scoring will favour new work over existing work.

The MTM:UK Awards were established in 2007 to champion the next generation of Musical Theatre producers, writers and shows.  Whilst Musical Theatre is not excluded from many other Edinburgh awards, the artform did not seem to be achieving the plaudits deserved by the creatives.  In addition we wanted to ensure that all new works received a review on-line which could help lead audiences, other critics, and talent spotters to this new work.  In the first two years we reviewed 132 mainly new works and 11 shows were selected for commendations and awards.

Many of those pieces, or the creatives involved have moved on – 6 of the 11 have had presentations in London, one is heading to the New York summer play festival as we prepare this document, three have had UK tours.  With the help of the whole industry we can, we hope, raise the profile of the next generation of Musical Theatre so that audiences will grow familiar of new names, and welcome new projects.

Please visit the 2008 awards pages by clicking here.