Once you have registered, we will send adjudicators to your production. You must reserve ten seats for each performance of your show for our adjudicators and for representatives of the program. As we schedule our adjudicators and representatives, we will let you know when they will arrive so you can release seats we will not use. The adjudicators and representatives will claim their seat or seats by 10 minutes before curtain time.

The adjudicators will evaluate your production and the nominated performers based on our criteria. Basically, we are looking for a tale well told, by your production and its ensemble, and by the nominated individuals performing in it.

For the production awards — Best Production, Best Direction, and Best Ensemble — we want to see how well you use the elements of theater to tell the story you have chosen: how well your company understood the story they were telling, how clearly they related it to the audience, how clearly the conflict was expressed, how involving the story was for cast and audience alike, how creatively you transferred the story from page to the stage.

For the individual awards — Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress — we will look for those who embody their characters and how well they express their character's journey through this story, how passionately they do so, and how well they perform the skills of musical theater (singing, dancing, and acting).

​Our adjudicators not only issue a score for each aspect they are evaluating, they will also generate written commentary to send back to the school for use in improving your programs. Each adjudicator will offer a critique of the production as a whole and for each student nominated for Best Actor or Best Actress. (We do not send evaluations of Supporting Actor/Actress nominees.)  Our goal is to offer constructive criticism in every case, material you can use in your academic work and in helping to develop each of the students under your tutelage.

Photo by Max Woltman Photography