It’s the quiet season right now for many of Tulsa’s community theatre artists. As in most other cities, locally produced plays and musicals here are spread across the calendar from September-ish through June, with impossible-to-see-it-all periods in the fall and spring. Even this annual “take a breather” moment is now filled by TPAC Produces, which is on its third year of delivering a banger of a late-summer musical (its Oklahoma! runs through August 16), and the Tulsa Fringe Festival.
Before long, actors and stage managers and set designers will be back on the community theatre boards across the city. But before that, these hardworking folks deserved to take a bow. Enter the Potate Awards, a ceremony whose name needs a little bit of explanation.
From 2008 to 2022, the end of each theatre season was marked by what was billed as “the Tonys of Tulsa”: the Tulsa Awards for Theatre Excellence (aka “the TATEs”), a George Kaiser Family Foundation initiative meant to incentivize excellence through an annual public awards ceremony complete with high-dollar prizes for the winners. Long story short, the TATEs generated some goodwill and some bad will through the years. Eventually, GKFF decided to deliver financial support for local theatre through a Theatre Development Fund facilitated by the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, instead of through a controversial awards ceremony, and the TATEs faded into the sunset.
The theatre community still wanted to celebrate at the end of the season, though, and an awards ceremony still sounded like it could be fun—so they set up a Google form for voting, bought booze for an open bar, and threw a party for themselves.
The fourth annual Potate Awards (note the play on “TATE”) was held at Theatre Tulsa Studios on July 12. You’ll find the full list of winners below. The level of specificity in the categories gives you a tiny glimpse into the unmatched vibe of this community. They point to, among other things, the incredible skills involved in theatre—organization, perseverance, initiative, collaboration, and problem-solving, to name a few—not to mention the ability to laugh while doing any and all of these things, sometimes across multiple shows, outside of day job hours.
This year, the “Sparkle Potato of the Year” award went to someone who’s pretty important to us at The Pickup, too: Alex Isaak, theatre critic! Alex has written 23 reviews for us in just over a year—I say “for us,” but it’s really for The Pickup’s performing-arts-savvy and theatre-curious readers, for the artists whose work Alex’s work takes seriously, and for Tulsa culture at large.
If you've been reading our arts coverage, you know that Tulsa’s theatre scene has been on a tear lately. Its capacity to celebrate and challenge itself is part of that dynamism. So, I'd like to suggest, is smart arts writing.