Drama Queen

Sánchez to receive Abbott Award at Carbonells

Each year at the Carbonell Awards, someone is honored for his or her long-term, significant contributions to the arts in South Florida.  At the 37th annual Carbonell ceremony on Monday, the evening's highest honor -- the George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts -- will be presented to Mario Ernesto Sánchez.

The founder of Miami's Teatro Avante came to the United States from Cuba on a Pedro Pan flight when he was 15.  After launching his Spanish-language company in 1979, Sánchez took on a large-scale annual challenge in 1985:  the International Hispanic Theatre Festival.  In July, he'll oversee the 28th edition of the festival at in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts and Teatro Prometeo.

Sánchez, who pays most of his bills with a busy career as a film and TV actor, has been hugely influential in elevating Spanish-language theater in South Florida.  The festival showcases adventurous, important productions from the Spanish-speaking world and beyond, and Teatro Avante has represented Miami at festivals around the world.   Sánchez has emphasized inclusion by presenting his shows with English supertitles and sometimes choosing productions that are more movement-driven than language-based.

Serious Spanish-language theater in South Florida is on the rise -- and Sánchez's festival, company and unwavering passion for his art form have plenty to do with that.

Also being honored during the Carbonell ceremony, which begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale, is Actors' Equity Association.  In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the actors' union will receive the Ruth Foreman Award, named for the late South Florida theater pioneer.

A trio of students from Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties will receive $1,000 Carbonell scholarships to pursue education in theater or journalism.  This year's honorees are Sammi-Jack Martincak of the New World School of the Arts, Christian Frost of J.P. Taravella High School and Jade Zaroff of West Boca Community High School.

The Carbonell ceremony isn't just a one-after-the-other awards presentation, of course.  It's also an impressive show that highlights nominated musicals and plays from 2012.  This year's show and ceremony has been put together by two Zoetic Stage founders who just happen to be nominees themselves:  producer Michael McKeever, whose play Moscow is up for best new work and who got a scenic design nomination for his I Am My Own Wifeset; and director Stuart Meltzer, whose direction of Zoetic's I Am My Own Wife earned him a nomination.

Under the musical direction of Caryl Fantel, the show will feature five performances by actors nominated for their work in musicals.  Vicki Lewis will sing Before the Parade Passes By fromthe Maltz Jupiter Theatre's Hello, Dolly!.  Former Miss America Kate Shindle will perform the title song from the Maltz's Cabaret.  Jodie Langel will sing I Miss the Mountains, one of her numbers in the Actors' Playhouse production of Next to Normal.  Matt Loehr, a double nominee for the Maltz's Hello, Dolly! and The Music Man, will sing Ya Got Troublefrom the latter.  And Wayne LeGette will perform The Stock Exchange Song from the Theatre at Arts Garage's production of Cabaret Verboten.

This year for the first time the Carbonell organization will be tweeting out the names of winners.  Follow those dramatic developments @CarbonellAwards.

Anyone can attend the show and ceremony, and there are still some tickets remaining.  They're $25 in advance, $35 at the door.  For tickets or information, call 954-462-0222 or visit the Broward Center web site.

(Photos show Mario Ernesto Sánchez, the Carbonell Award and the cast of Cabaret Verboten, with Wayne LeGette second from top.)

 

 

South Florida Theatre League has a racy proposition

The South Florida Theatre League wants you...to get in bed with the arts.

The umbrella organization for theaters from Miami to Jupiter has come up with a novel campaign to ratchet up awareness of the region's theatrical riches.  Bombshell Productions is building a bed on wheels that will travel from theater to theater during the annual WLRN Summer Theatre Fest June 1-Aug. 31, stopping at different theaters before Thursday performances.  Its final destination: the Coconut Grove Bed Race on Labor Day Weekend.

The League intends to do interviews with curious theater fans, asking them about what theater and the arts mean to them.  The fans can pose for photos beside the bed or, if they're adventurous, on it.  Interviews and photos will be posted on the League's web site.

The bed will make an early debut on Monday before the 37th annual Carbonell Awards -- or "Theater Prom," as the glammed-up theater folks call it -- outside the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.  The ceremony-show starts at 7:30 p.m., and afterwards, the bed will lead the way to the League-sponsored after party.

The full schedule of when and where the bed will appear will be released soon.  But expect it to turn up outside theaters with family-friendly fare (Slava's Snowshow at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts July 31-Aug. 25, Wind in the Willows at Sol Children's Theatre Aug. 9-25) as well as theaters with plays whose titles invite an adults-only audience (Cock at GableStage May 18-June 16, and a Mad Cat world premiere of a play about Isabella Blow Aug. 15-Sept. 1).

 

(Rendering of bed by Bombshell Productions; Carbonell Award statue designed by Manuel Carbonell) 

 

Kids and the Colony...and the Carbonells

Miami Childrens Theater has found a swanky professional venue for its theater summer camp:  the Colony Theater on Miami Beach's Lincoln Road.  The ambitious, very active MCT will hold its camp there from July 15 to Aug. 10, operating from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, but potential campers and their parents can get a preview this Sunday during an open house from 3 to 7 p.m.

Tuition for the camp is $1,500, but some full and partial scholarships are available by audition.  South Florida actress and director Christine Vega is leading the camp program for MCT, and she'll direct the production that will be the culmination of all that the students learn:  Disney's Beauty and the Beast, running Aug. 9-10.

You don't need to wait until the summer, though, to see what MCT's young performers can do.  The company is winding up its run of Gypsy at 7 p.m. tonight and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday at the Alper JCC, 11155 SW 112th St., Miami, with tickets priced at $15.  MCT is also doing Jason Robert Brown's Songs for a New World at the Alper April 4-7, and Disney's The Little Mermaid at Pinecrest Gardens April 26-28. 

For information on the company or its camp at the Colony, call 305-274-3595 or visit the MCT web site.

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The 37th annual Carbonell Awards, a.k.a. South Florida's "theater prom," are set for Monday, April 1 at 7:30 p.m. in the Amaturo Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.

Nominees, a wide range of theater artists, company heads and the public are all invited, and tickets are now on sale.  Those tickets are $25 ($35 the day of the ceremony), with discounts for groups of 10 or more.

Playwright Michael McKeever and director Stuart Meltzer are putting together the show, which will feature performances from nominated musicals -- and much more.

The Broward Center is at 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale. To order tickets, call 954-462-0222 or visit the Broward Center web site.

(Photos show an MCT performer, Christine Vega and the Carbonell Award, designed by sculptor Manuel Carbonell)

 

Theaters reap Knight Arts Challenge support

Last night, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation made South Florida artists and arts groups happy to the tune of $2.28 million.  The Knight Arts Challenge will fund 34 projects, bringing the total of arts projects funded since 2008 to 143 -- representing nearly $20 million in support for ideas to enhance the arts in the region the foundation calls home.  Those funds are part of a larger $86 million investment the Knight Foundation has made in South Florida arts, and the foundation just announced that it will invest $23 million more to extend the Knight Arts Challenge through 2015 and support projects at seven institutions.

The 34 newly revealed grants will fund projects in the visual arts, music, dance, arts education -- and seven that focus on or include theater.  The 2012 theater winners, who have to match the Knight Arts Challenge funding, are:

*Actors' Playhouse of Coral Gables, which receives $40,000 to bring 3,000 students from 8th to 12th grade to its production of the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights; the experience includes study guides, discussions with the director and actors, and a rap-writing contest, with finalists performing at the Miracle Theatre.

*Miami's Centro Cultural Español, which receives $100,000 to produce 15-minute short plays in Spanish and English three times a year in intimately sized shipping containers.

* The Deering Estate Foundation, which will receive $35,000 to help create a playwright development program, retreats and a resident theater company at its historic facility.

*FUNDarte, which gets $100,000 for its Miami on Stage Knight New Works project, selecting three projects to fully produce and tour to two additional locations.

*Miami Theater Center in Miami Shores, which will receive $100,000 to help individuals and small performing arts groups develop work in its discounted 70-seat Sandbox space; those selected get marketing help, a commissioning fee, and rehearsal and performance space.

*The Project [theatre], which gets $25,000 toward developing larger-scale, immersive, site-specific theater experiences in Miami.

*Arts Garage in Delray Beach, which includes the Theatre at Arts Garage, won the Knight Arts Challenge People's Choice Award, receiving $20,000 to enhance its artistically eclectic programming.

For more information on the Knight Arts Challenge program in Miami, visit the foundation's web page.

 

 

 

GableStage gets NEA grant for McCraney 'Hamlet'

GableStage, which will join with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and New York's Public Theater in premieringTarell Alvin McCraney's set-in-Haiti Antony and Cleopatra next season, has just been awarded a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts Art Works grant to support its upcoming production of Hamlet.  The 90-minute adaptation by McCraney and Bijan Sheibani, commissioned by the RSC, will run at GableStage Jan. 12-Feb. 10, then be performed free for 15,000 Miami-Dade County Public Schools students at the Joseph Caleb Auditorium in Liberty City and the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center in Cutler Bay.

The NEA received 1,509 eligible applications for the Art Works grants from not-for-profit groups seeking more than $74 million in support.  GableStage's is one of 832 approved grants totalling $22.3 million.

McCraney will direct his adaptation, and he has now settled on his cast.  Edgar Sanchez will play Hamlet, with Dylan Kammerer as Horatio, James Randolph as Claudius and the Ghost, Alana Arenas as Gertrude, Peter Haig as Polonius, Ryan George as Laertes and Rosencrantz, Mimi Davila as Ophelia and Arielle Hoffman as Guildenstern and a player.

Performances will be at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday (no evening show the first weekend).  Tickets range from $37.50-$50.  GableStage performs in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables.  For information, call 305-445-1119 or visit the theater's web site.

Stage veterans, newcomers score Silver Palm Awards

The Silver Palm Awards are to South Florida's Carbonell Awards as Off-Broadway's Obie Awards are to Broadway's Tonys.  The five-year-old Silver Palms have "...no nominees, no winners or losers, and no limit to the number of citations given in any 'category,' though there really are no official categories," says playwright Tony Finstrom, the awards' chairman and founder.

In other words, the awards for excellence in local theater from Sept. 1, 2011, to Aug. 31, 2012, are more free-form than the Carbonells.  Finstrom, TV host Iris Acker and critic Ron Levitt form the Silver Palm committee, and recommendations are made by a panel of critics and theater freelancers (including me).

This year's awards will be presented during the annual holiday party held by the South Florida Theatre League.  The celebration happens Dec. 3 from 7:30 to 11 p.m. at a to-be-announced Fort Lauderdale venue. Non-Theatre League members will pay an admission fee, but members party for free.  For info and reservations, call Andie Arthur at 954-577-0778; for Silver Palm details, visit the organization's web site.

Now to the winners, which for the first time include six previous Silver Palm recipients.  The year's honored directors are GableStage's Joseph Adler (for Race, Red, The Motherf**ker With the Hat and Time Stands Still), Actors' Playhouse's David Arisco (for Next to Normal and Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol), Margaret M. Ledford (for After the Revolution at the Caldwell Theatre Company, The Unseen at Promethean Theatre and Turn of the Screw at the Naked Stage) and Stuart Meltzer (for his consistently outstanding work as Zoetic Stage's resident director). 

The honored playwrights are Mark Della Ventura (for writing and performing Small Membership, and for his performance in Lobby Hero, both at Alliance Theatre Lab), Christopher Demos-Brown (for Captiva at Zoetic), Kim Ehly (as outstanding new playwright for Baby GirL, a Kutumba Theatre Project production at Empire Stage) and Michael McKeever (for Moscow at Zoetic).

Actors being honored with Silver Palms are Katherine Amadeo (for Naked Stage's Turn of the Screw), Jim Ballard (for All My Sons and The Fantasticks at Palm Beach Dramaworks and Side Effects at Mosaic Theatre), Ken Clement (for Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol and Becky's New Car at Actors' Playhouse and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers at Stage Door Theatre), Todd Allen Durkin (for Captiva at Zoetic, A Steady Rain at GableStage and A Measure of Cruelty at Mosaic), Lindsey Forgey (as outstanding new talent for Baby GirL at Empire Stage and Into the Woods, Urinetown and Xanadu at Slow Burn Theatre), Jodie Langel for Next to Normal at Actors' Playhouse and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre), Laura Turnbull (for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds at Dramaworks, Becky's New Car at Actors' Playhouse and Death and the Maiden at Mosaic) and Gregg Weiner (for Red, A Steady Rain, Race and Time Stands Still at GableStage).

Also being honored are set designer Michael Amico (for his Palm Beach Dramaworks designs for All My Sons, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and Master Harold...and the boys) and Fort Lauderdale's Island City Stage (as outstanding new theater company for its debut with The Twentieth Century Way at Empire Stage).

The Theatre League will also present its annual Remy Awards at the holiday celebration. Director Amy London, executive director of the Carbonell Awards, gets the Pioneer Award, and journalist Bill Hirschman gets the Service Award for his Florida Theater On Stage blog.

(Photo of Gregg Weiner and Todd Allen Durkin in GableStage's A Steady Rain; photo of Nori Tecosky and Lindsey Forgey in Kutumba Theatre's Baby GirL)

 

 

 

Durang, Ayvazian headline CityWrights weekend

Christopher Durang and Leslie Ayvazian are celebrated playwrights, actors and teachers.  This Friday and Saturday, they'll draw on all that expertise as they play various roles during CityWrights, a City Theatre-sponsored conference for playwrights backed by a significant grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight Arts Challenge.

Durang, who is coming to the symposium as part of the Dramatists Guild's Traveling Masters program, is the award-winning author of such stinging, funny plays as Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Beyond Therapy, A History of the American Film, Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Miss Witherspoon (a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize), and Why Torture Is Wrong, and The People Who Love Them(produced at Plantation's Mosaic Theatre in 2009).  He and Marsha Norman co-chair the play-writing program at Juilliard, and he has acted in his own work and in 10 movies.

Ayvazian, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, is an award-winning playwright and actress who performed her solo show High Dive in 2002  for City Theatre at Miami Beach's Colony Theater (South Florida actress Barbara Sloan also did the play in 2011 at New Theatre).  Her other plays include Deaf Day, Nine Armenians and Make Me, and her acting gigs have ranged from Broadway to multiple episodes in the various Law & Order series.

Other presenters and participants in CityWrights, which was put together by City Theatre co-founder and literary director Susan Westfall, include director of the Center for the Theater Commons and HowlRoundeditor Polly Carl, Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival coordinator Billie Davis, writer-musician Ivan Anderson, playwright and South Florida Theatre League executive director Andie Arthur, Atlantic Theater Company associate artistic director Christian Parker, Dramatists Guild Fund executive director Rachel Routh, literary agency head Susan Schulman, Broadway producer Joan Stein, director-writer-producer Roland Tec, former National New Play Network president and Florida Stage managing director Nancy Barnett, Samuel French literary manager Amy Rose Marsh, artistic directors Ricky J. Martinez of New Theatre and John Manzelli of City Theatre, and attorneys David H. Faux, Andrew Peretz and Steven E. Eisenberg.

At Thursday's launch party from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Sabadell United Bank Building, City Theatre will honor playwright Carey Crim, whose Green Dot Day won the 2012 City Theatre National Award for Short Playwriting.  Currently part of the Summer Shorts festival at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the play is about a couple trying hard, on schedule, to have a baby.  Fifteen other playwrights will be honored as finalists during the event.

Two days of CityWrights sessions will take place Friday and Saturday at Miami's Epic Hotel, 270 Biscayne Boulevard Way, with a wrap-up Samuel French presentationn on Sunday morning. Sessions will focus on the art and business of putting up a show, the rights of playwrights, writing and creative sessions, the art of collaboration, the playwright as actor and director, submitting work and more, and Ayvazian and Durang will read from their new work Saturday evening.

The cost of attending the entire conference is $325 ($275 for Florida professionals), and City Theatre is now offering a $150 day rate for Friday or Saturday.  For information, call 305-755-9401, ext. 10, email CityWrights@citytheatre.com or visit the company's web site.

 

 

 

Carbonells honor Harris; justice and satire on campus

Catching up with some varied news from South Florida's always-busy theater scene.

Producer Jay H. Harris has been named the 2012 recipient of the George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, an honor to be presented at the Carbonell Awards ceremony on Monday, April 2.  The Carbonells are, of course, South Florida's top theater award.  And the Abbott award, named for legendary producer-director-playwright George Abbott, is the Carbonells' most prestigious honor.  Harris has a huge theater resume, having supported productions at numerous South Florida theaters (including New Theatre's world premiere of Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, which won the Pulitzer Prize and which Harris then produced in London).  He has also produced shows in numerous other American cities and in New York, where his production of Say Goodnight Gracie was nominated for a Tony Award.  Harris also played a major role in the evolution of the Carbonell Awards program, serving on its board from 2001 to 2008 and helping devise the current voting structure.

Harris will be honored, as will a host of Carbonell nominees and winners, during a show and ceremony beginning at 7:30 p.m. April 2 in the Amaturo Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale.  Tickets are $25 in advance, $35 at the door, and the public is invited.  Numbers from each of this year's nominated musicals are part of the show, and admission to an after-party at the Green Room, 109 SW Second Ave., is free with a Carbonell ticket.  For information, call the Broward Center box office at 954-462-0222, email carbexec@aol.com, or visit the Broward Center's web site.

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Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking, is coming to speak about capital punishment at the Florida International University campus April 13, in a free presentation running from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the campus' Graham Center student union. In honor of her appearance the FIU Theater Department and Honors College are joining forces to present readings and a performance of three justice-themed plays.  On Thursday, students from the Honors College will do a reading of Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank's The Exonerated. David Mamet's Oleanna gets a reading by theater students on March 29. Then Phillip M. Church directs theater students in a reading of Tim Robbins' adaptation of Dead Man Walking April 5.

All performances take place at 7 p.m. in the FIU Black Box Theater at the Wertheim Performing Arts Center, 11200 SW Eighth St., Miami. Admission is free, and talk-backs follow each event.  For information, call 305-348-3394.

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Though you won't have long to go (sorry), if you've managed to miss Urinetown during its earlier South Florida stagings at Actors' Playhouse, Slow Burn Theatre and so on, you have another chance to see it this Thursday-Sunday. John Manzelli directs students from Barry University's Department of Fine Arts in the Tony Award-winning musical about the strict regulation of bathroom privileges during a drought.  Ranging stylistically from the stinging social satire in the manner of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht to spoofs of other Broadway musicals, Urinetown is provocative, funny and not for the kiddies.

Performances are at the Broad Center for the Performing Arts, 11300 NE Second Ave., Miami Shores.  And get this: Admission is free.  Performances are at 7 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, with no reservations required.  Need info? Call 305-899-3291.

Barry on Broadway, Lowery at Sundance

Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry, the prolific author and occasional Rock Bottom Remainders rocker, has more than promoting his new comic novel Lunatics (co-written with former Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel) on the horizon.  The news from New York today is that Peter and the Starcatcher, a play-with-music based on Peter and the Starcatchers by Barry and Ridley Pearson, will begin previews at Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theatre March 28.  Tickets for the show, which has its official opening April 15, go on sale Feb. 13 via Ticketmaster.

Adapted for the stage by Jersey Boys co-author Rick Elice, the play features a dozen actors playing 50 characters in the "prequel" to Peter Pan.  Twice extended during its spring 2011 run at Off-Broadway's New York Theatre Workshop, the show won the 2011 Obie Award for its two directors, Alex Timbers (Tony Award nominated for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and Roger Rees (Tony winner for his leading performance in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby).  The two will team again to stage the show on Broadway, but the cast hasn't been announced yet.

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Barbara Lowery, a much-admired actress, director and long-time drama teacher, got a wonderful surprise last week when she learned just how much she still means to actor Rob Morrow, who was her student at Miami Sunset High School from 1978 to 1980.

Morrow, the film and television actor who was a regular on Northern Exposure and Numb3rs, nominated Lowery for the non-profit Creative Coalition's 2012 Teachers Making a Difference award.  She'll receive it on Monday at a program and luncheon in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival.

This is a big deal for the woman who followed her five years at Sunset with 19 at Miami Dade College's North Campus.  She's one of only two teachers being honored.  The other is Sister Marionette Gibson, who taught actress Alfre Woodard.  Actor Wilmer Valderrama is serving as moderator, conducting a conversation with each teacher-actor pair, and Morrow will present Lowery with her award.

Lowery, who earned her master's degree from the University of Miami, studied at both Stella Adler and the H.B. Studio in New York. She is a Carbonell Award-winning director who has staged professional productions for the now-defunct Acme Acting Company, City Theatre's Summer Shorts, New Theatre and the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

She says of the honor, "Excited, shocked and touched are the words that come to mind.  Rob was not only obviously talented as a teenager, he was extraordinarily focused...in pursuing his dream."

How great that a now-famous student's long memory has led to celebrating the work of a superb teacher who really did make a difference in his life.

 

Sculptor Manuel Carbonell has died

Manuel Carbonell, last of the Cuban master sculptors and the man for whom South Florida theater's Carbonell Awards are named, died Thursday in Miami.  He had celebrated his 93rd birthday Oct. 25, was still working in his studio at the age of 92.

Of Spanish descent, Carbonell was born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, where he began drawing and sculpting clay figures as a boy.  He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, as did fellow sculptors Wifredo Lam and Agustin Cardenas.  From 1945 to 1959, he began receiving critical acclaim for his life-sized sculptures and carvings, as well as hosting a weekly television show on art and creating furniture for the interior design firm he had launched.

Leaving Cuba for New York in 1959, Carbonell moved from classical and religious sculpture to his modernist style, working in hammered metal and bronze as he created large-scale, sensuous work that was more abstract.  He relocated to Miami in 1964, reuniting with the extended Cuban family (including sisters Angela and Josefina) that was by his side throughout his life.  His nephew Ricardo Gonzalez III eventually became director of Carbonell's Miami-based Beaux Arts Gallery, launched in 1988.

In 1992, Carbonell won a competition to create a sculpture at Miami's Brickell Avenue bridge.  The bronze monument, titled "The Pillar of History," features a 36-foot-tall bas-relief column with 158 figures depicting the story of the Tequesta Indians, Miami's first inhabitants.  Atop the pillar is a 17-foot-high sculpture of a Tequesta warrior, his wife and child.  In niches at the supporting piers are 4-by-8-foot bas reliefs honoring Miami pioneers Julia Tuttle, Henry Flagler, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, and William and Mary Brickell.

Carbonell's large-scale sculptures are found all over the world -- in a Shanghai park, at the Gerald R. Ford presidential museum in Michigan, at the San Carlos Institute in Key West and in numerous Florida cities.

A Brickell Key condominium building was named for him, but his more artistically important namesake is the 36-year-old Carbonell Awards.  In 1976, the artist created the egg-shaped bronze sculpture on a marble base given annually to South Florida's actors, directors, designers, musical directors and choreographers to recognize the best work in the region's far-flung theater community.  In recognition of what would become a three-decades-plus contribution as the program's grand benefactor, the awards were rechristened in Carbonell's honor.

A mass and celebration of the sculptor's life will be held at 6 p.m. Friday in the chapel of Belen Preparatory School, 500 SW 127th Ave., Miami.