The Week in Review

PLASA Show Ends on a High Note: The PLASA Show was marked by lively attendance, plenty of networking, and an equal amount of socializing, right up to the final day on September 14. Congratulations to the winners of the PLASA Awards for Innovation: Martin Professional, Harman, Cromlech, Gerriets, ELC, Total Solution, and GDS. To read more about the winning products, go to http://gourl.gr/lbz.

Clay Paky Knights of Illumination: And congratulations to the winners of the Knight of Illumination Awards, sponsored by Clay Paky and held on last Monday night. The awards honor achievement in the British lighting world. In the television category, Simon Butcher won for the BBC One medical drama Casualty, as did Roger Williams for the variety series Tonight's the Night, Matt Carter for the talk show ITV Daybreak, and Al Gurdon for the Super Bowl Halftime Show. In the rock category, Michael Straum won for the recent tour of the Scottish indie band Glasvegas, as did Jamie Thompson for the Irish trio The Script. In the theatre category, Charles Atlas won for the Tate Project, a dance event, followed by Wolfgang Goebbel for a production of Tristan und Isolde at Grange Park Opera, Bruno Poet for the National Theatre production of Frankenstein, and Hugh Vanstone for the current West End production of The Wizard of Oz.

Garth Drabinsky, Jailbird: In the latest, and probably the final, chapter in a long-running legal saga, the controversial Canadian theatrical producer Garth Drabinsky found his fraud conviction upheld by an appeals court, the New York Times reports. As the paper notes, Drabinsky, the man who brought you Hal Prince's Show Boat and the original production of Ragtime, and his associate Myron I. Gottlieb, "were convicted in 2009 of defrauding investors of about 500 million Canadian dollars through a complex system of kickbacks and by routinely altering the company's financial statements." Thanks to the peculiarities of Canadian law, although Drabinsky has one more appeal left, he is heading for jail in the immediate future. (The court reduced his sentence by two years, to five years.) Envisioning himself as Icarus, Drabinsky once wrote a memoir titled Closer to the Sun. The title must seem all too appropriate now. For more, go to tp://gourl.gr/lb0.