The Green Room Awards were announced yesterday. The big winners were La Mama and the Malthouse, with the latter winning 10 awards. La Mama in fact doubly won the new play category, with Gabrielle Macdonald's Debt and Peter Houghton's The Pitch sharing the gong. Peter Houghton also scooped the Best Male Actor for The Pitch (La Mama, opening next week at the Malthouse) and his performance of Hamm in Eleventh Hour's For Samuel Beckett. The Malthouse productions of Kage Physical Theatre's Headlock and Nigel Jamieson's Honour Bound, which is soon to tour to Europe, both figured prominently.

The big loser is the MTC, which won a single award (for the design of Festen) and dipped out badly to Dusty: The Musical in the musical theatre category, where it had nine nominations for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Something is a little flat in South Melbourne, methinks...could Simon Phillips be too busy with commercial projects like Priscilla: Queen of the Desert to keep his eye on the ball?