IF the $85 ticket price for the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards is pushing it on a Christmas-time budget, perhaps the Chapman Kips is more your thing.
Both the awards celebrate practitioners of theatre, they are both on at the same time of year and their names sound the same. There, the similarities end.
“[The Chapman Kip’s are] sillier, and there’s more roasting,” says Dean Hewison, one of the event’s organisers.
By “roasting”, Hewison means something like singer and actor Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roasts, where Martin and his panel of pals would make fun of big stars of the day to great applause. It’s worth a YouTube search.
The man to get the biggest roasting was Eli Kent, the winner of this year’s Bruce Mason Playwriting Award and finalist for the youth section of the Wellingtonian of the year awards.
“He won our lifetime achievement award, too. There’s a certain beauty to giving it to someone who’s 22.”
Organisers poked fun at Kent’s many successes by photoshopping his head onto pictures of MasterChef winners, Tyra Banks and Jesus.
“He took it all in just the right spirit,” says Hewison.
The Chapman Kips are named for actor Kip Chapman; the alternative theatre awards were his idea.
The event is in its third year. The first year it was on the stairwell in the Bats [Theatre] foyer, then we moved into the theatre and this year we even had [it on a screen,” says Hewison.
Honourable mentions go to Michael Wray, who won the award for smallest part (“he lay face down on the stage for an hour and only stood up to bow”) and Capital Times theatre reviewer Lynn Freeman, who won the award for “best pash” alongside The Real Inspector Hound costar Jackson Coe.
“She did manage to get her lips over everybody in the cast with varying degrees of passion, but she obviously enjoyed Jackson the most. It was the longest and seemed the most enjoyable,” says Hewison.  
The awards may not be taken quite as seriously as the Chapman Tripps, but they do sound like lots more fun.