Carlton students bring home major awards from drama festival

“[This is] an amazing group of students, they’re incredibly dedicated and focused and to receive [these] awards is something that we really feel in celebrating because it enables us as a group to work towards the provincial festival,” Zulkoskey said.

“To be honest, when the awards were announced, I sat in my seat because I couldn’t believe we had achieved that level. We knew our performance was very good, we’ve been a bridesmaid many times, but not the actual bride and to get the awards the kids were screaming and it was just a wonderful sense of celebration of student artistic ability,” he said with a chuckle.

The cast and crew will now represent Region 11 at the Saskatchewan Drama Association’s Provincial Festival at the University of Regina’s Riddell Centre Theatre from May 9 to 11.

Zulkoskey said moving on to provincials gives the cast and crew some more time together and helps them focus on the end of the dramatic season at Carlton.

“We haven’t been to provincials in six years, so we’ve never been on this stage at the U of R and it will enable us to showcase what we can do here with this production. We will be competing against probably about 13-14 schools from the 14-15 regions in the province,” Zulkoskey said.

Right now the students are very enthusiastic about going to provincials and are working on tweaking anything they feel needs to be tweaked before their performance in Regina.

“The wonderful things about the awards is that students were recognized as individuals within the awards, so students that have displayed a lot of talent, a lot of ability we’re recognized as well as the entire group. So it was a really good form of team building and recognition of individual effort as well,” Zulkoskey said.

Jena Mailloux, a student at Carlton, took home the Mary Ellen Burgess Award for excellence in acting performance for her role as “Fay.”

Mailloux said it was pretty amazing to bring home the award, adding it feels really good to be recognized for her acting.

“I put a lot of work into it. I wasn’t expecting anything or anything like that but when my name did get called I was almost in shock. It was a pretty amazing feeling,” said Mailloux.

She said it was the highlight of everyone’s week and they are pretty excited about going to provincials.

Awards the Mad Hatter Theatre Company brought home

Best Play

Best Technical Production

Best State Manager – Layne Young

Mary Ellen Burgess Award for excellence in Acting Performance – Jena Mailloux (character Fay)

Runner-up to the Bob Hinet Award for an individual in Technical Expertise – Jordon Dupuis for gunshot effects device

One of four Medallions for Acting Excellence – Lukas McConechy (character Robey)

A Certificate for Acting Excellence – Sarah Tweidt (character Holly)

Two of four Medallions for Technical Excellence – Nicole Matheis for piano performance and score and Malissa Paul for set design

Spirit of the Festival Award presented to one member of each production for dedication – Malissa Paul

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by Sarah Wallace

Carlton students bring home major awards from drama festival

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