NEW YORK – This year's Drama Desk Awards, held May 23 at the Hammerstein Ballroom at Manhattan Center, may have been a little less dramatic than most, as far as the top awards for sound design for a musical and play were concerned. The sound design winners for top musical and play, respectively – Brian Ronan and Acme Sound Partners/Cricket S. Myers – were the odds-on favorites with two awards nominations each.
In Ronan's case, the nominations were for the musicals Anything Goes (which won) and The Book of Mormon. Other sound design nominees in the musicals category included Lindsay Jones for The Burnt Part Boys, Michael Rasbury for Hello Again and Jon Weston for In Transit.
Acme Sound Partners and Cricket S. Myers won for the play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, besting The Merchant of Venice, for which the Acme/Myers team had also been nominated. Other nominees for outstanding sound design in a play included Ian Dickinson for John Gabriel Borkman, Brett Jarvis for Baby Universe, Bray Poor for Wings and Eric Shimelonis for The Hallway Trilogy.
