Record Number Register Nominations for WOS Awards

Nearly 12,000 theatregoers have registered their nominations for the 2012 Whatsonstage.com Awards – smashing last year’s record of 7,000.

The nominations phase closed at midnight last night (30 November 2011), with shortlists being announced during our Launch Party at the West End’s Café de Paris tomorrow lunchtime (2 December 2011), attended by 500+ actors, directors, playwrights and other leading theatre professionals. The nominees will be announced on the website at 2pm, with voting going live immediately.

To acknowledge the fact that so many people contributed this year, for the first time Whatsonstage.com will also publish longlists on the website next week, naming those actors, directors, writers, creatives, productions and events that narrowly missed out on the voting stage but merit a mention nonetheless.

The Whatsonstage.com Awards are the only major theatre award voted for entirely by the public. Results are announced during our Winners’ Concert, produced by Stuart Piper and Jason Haigh-Ellery on
behalf of Whatsonstage.com, at the West End’s Prince of Wales Theatre on
19 February.

Previous concert presenters have included James Corden, Sheridan Smith, Christopher Biggins, Miranda Hart and Mel Giedroyc.

To help us read the shortlists tomorrow, we’ll be joined by three big names from this past year’s Whatsonstage.com Awards: Meera Syal, who won Best Solo Performance for Shirley Valentine and returns to the stage for the RSC in next year’s World Shakespeare Festival; Nigel Lindsay, who scooped Best Actor in a Play for Broken Glass and is now greening up at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in screen-to-stage Broadway blockbuster Shrek The Musical; and Jemima Rooper, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Play for All My Sons and has just returned to the West End opposite James Corden in One Man, Two Guvnors.

Other special guests will include actor (and another former nominee) Malcolm Sinclair, president of Equity, a sponsor of the Awards, West End producer Joseph Smith, the new chief executive of this year’s adopted charity Stage One, and Matilda star Bertie Carvel, who draw the charity raffle.

Top row, L-R: Will Payne, Daniel Healy, Nick Blood & Andrew Knott in Backbeat. Second row: Malcolm Sinclair, Nigel Lindsay as Shrek, Nigel Lindsay, Meera Syal

There will also be performances from Shayne Ward, Richard Fleeshman and the Fab Four (or, in this case Five: Nick Blood,
Andrew Knott, Daniel Healy, Will Payne and Oliver Bennett), who will sing numbers from their respective hit shows – Rock of Ages at the Shaftesbury Theatre, Ghost the Musical at the Piccadilly Theatre and Backbeat at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

For further information about the Whatsonstage.com Awards, visit Whatsonstage.com/Awards

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