Theatre

Celebration Theatre has garnered over 100 award nominations over its history, ultimately being awarded 14 LA Stage Alliance Ovation awards and a total of 60 nominations; 22 LA Weekly Theater Awards and 36 total nominations; 11 Back Stage Garland Awards; 13 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards, including the Polly Warfield Award for Outstanding Season for a Small Theater and the Margaret Harford Award for sustained excellence; 4 NAACP Theatre Awards; 3 GLAAD Media Awards as well as the 2012 Pat Parker Cultural Arts Award from LA PRIDE and the City of West Hollywood Rainbow Key Award.

In that time, Celebration has pushed the boundaries, often being at the vanguard of what is considered possible for not only an LGBTQIA+ theatre, but also for an intimate venue. Chay Yew's A Language of Their Own received its world premiere at Celebration Theatre in May 1994, directed by Tim Dang, before being mounted at The Public Theater in New York the following year. Mark Savages' coming-out musical The Ballad Of Little Mikey also premiered in 1994 and has since seen productions in a dozen US cities. In 2000, the theatre received permission from Stephen Sondheim to produce the first gay version of his two-person chamber musical, Marry Me A Little. The production was historic, as noted in several theater journals and the New York Times. Celebration has become known for producing larger-scale works in a smaller space, with award-winning productions of The Color Purple, Take Me Out, The Boy from Oz, Cabaret, The Producers and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, to name a few. In 2018, Celebration’s production of Die, Mommie, Die was selected to be part of Center Theater Group’s Block Party, which celebrates intimate theater in Los Angeles by selecting three outstanding works of the intimate theater season and giving them a full Equity production. This production raised Celebration’s visibility and brought more recognition to the theater while cementing relationships with other area theaters.

Celebration has long contributed to the larger theater community, premiering work that moves on to and inspires further production. In 1998, Celebration premiered Naked Boys Singing, which went on to a twenty-year off-Broadway run. In 2002, Celebration posted a record three shows to Frontiers Newsmagazine’s list of Ten Best Gay Plays: Insurrection: Holding History, The Hungry Woman: a Mexican Media and Christmastime is Queer. In 2006, the world premiere musical Play It Cool earned Ovation and LA Weekly Award nominations. The musical opened off-Broadway in 2011 and earned an Outer Critics Circle nomination for Best Musical. The West End and Broadway productions of The Color Purple: A New Musical were heavily influenced by the pared-down staging concept developed by director Michael Matthews at Celebration Theatre in 2012. As the first intimate staging of this work, the Celebration production preceded both the London and Tony-winning Broadway revivals, garnering 13 Ovation award nominations and three wins. More recently, Drew Droege’s Happy Birthday, Doug and Bright Colors, Bold Patterns, Byron Lane's Tilda Swinton Answers An Ad On Craigslist and Jimmy  Fowlie's So Long, Boulder City have gone on to successful Off-Broadway runs and Justin Sayre's episodic soap opera Ravenswood Manor was optioned by SONY.

As noted in the Los Angeles Times, “Celebration Theatre’s raise-the-roof production shows up bigger, better-funded venues in town. In LA, less is so often more. Pantages, Center Theatre Group, La Mirada, are you watching?”

As part of its mission to foster new work and new voices, Celebration hosts “Celebrating New Works, “ a series of new play readings, each selected from ongoing literary submissions. Each reading includes an audience talkback to spur constructive dialogue about the work between viewers, actors, and writers. Some works have been further developed on our stage through workshops and even mainstage productions.