The more things change, the more they do not stay the same for the Colorado Theatre Guild.

For years, gender-equality advocates have been asking organizers of all major awards shows to reconsider how they categorize nominees at a time of change when most nonbinary performers do not define themselves as either male actors or female actresses.

The leading advocacy group for live theater in Colorado today moved the issue forward further than either the Oscars or the Tony Awards have been willing to go.

The Colorado Theatre Guild’s newly released 19th annual Henry Award nominations reflect a major and perhaps history-making change. The Guild has morphed all 16 of its previous individual actor categories into eight groups of genderless “outstanding performer” nominees. That means there are no “outstanding actor” or “actress” categories anymore.

Two performers from among the 10-13 nominees in each category will be declared winners on July 28 — regardless of gender. The change essentially makes gender irrelevant.

Timely evidence for why gendered awards should be eliminated, advocates say, came Sunday night, when Cole Escola became the first nonbinary actor to win a Tony Award for a leading role. Escola was named best leading actor in a play, but only after Escola, lacking a better alternative, agreed to be included in that category.

“We’re serious about listening to the community and acting on behalf of positive change,” Colorado Theatre Guild President Betty Hart told The Denver Gazette.

This change opens the door to all kinds of delicious new Henry Award nomination scenarios. For example: Hedwig (Clark Destin Jones) vs. Mary Poppins (Madison Falkenstine). (Ironically, Jones also played Bert in “Mary Poppins.”)

Or this: Buntport Theater Company presented an ensemble play called “Eyes Up, Mouth Agape,” and a whopping four of its actors placed among the 10 nominees for “featured performer in a play” — Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Brian Colonna and Erik Edborg. Two identify as male, one female and one genderqueer. All four are previous Henry Award nominees, but never before have those who identify as male been considered alongside actors who identify as women. (Two years ago, the Henrys’ first openly nonbinary nominee was placed in the “outstanding actor” category.)

Similarly, three featured actors (two male, one female) are nominated in the same category from Curious Theatre’s excellent play, “Downstate.”

Because the Guild splits its awards into two tiers based on operating budget, and also between plays and musicals, there are a whopping 85 actors nominated in one of the eight new “outstanding performer” categories. (Of those, about 60% appear to identify as men.) The top two point-getters from ballots scored by Guild adjudicators win. If both happen to identify as men, or women, or something in between, Hart said, so be it. The top two win.

Denver Center again leads way 

The Guild’s process change actually overshadowed the nominee slate for the always controversial but intensely followed awards celebration.

As might be expected, the Tony Award-winning Denver Center Theatre Company led all Colorado troupes with 29 nominations, followed by the breakthrough company of the year, Grand Lake’s rock-solid summer-only Rocky Mountain Repertory Theatre Company, with 23. (But the Henry Awards are often a bit of a boomerang: Last year, Rocky Mountain Rep landed just three nominations.)

The Arvada Center, the leading company from a year ago, was next with 17 — all for its two hit musicals, “Waitress” (10) and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” (seven). What’s wild about that is it continues an ongoing streak with all of the Arvada Center’s nominations going to its musicals, while none went to its generally celebrated plays. That’s now 73 straight nominations for Arvada Center musicals since its last nod for a play.

Lakewood’s Performance Now equaled last year’s bounty with 14 nominations. Every year, the Henry Awards tend to uplift one upstart company, and this year, that is the 23-year-old Firehouse Theater, located on the campus of the Colorado Free University. Firehouse took home 11 nominations remarkably spread out among four titles. That’s second only to the Denver Center Theatre Company for most titles recognized (with five).

The most honored musical of the year is the Denver Center’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” with 11 nominations. Chris Coleman’s Broadway-quality take on the lighthearted musical parody of Roger Corman’s 1960 B-movie classic earned three acting awards from among its New York-based ensemble. That’s followed by Rocky Mountain Rep’s “The Music Man” and the Arvada Center’s “Waitress,” with 10 each, and Rocky Mountain Rep’s “Come from Away” (nine).

Three plays came in with a leading six nominations each: Curious Theatre’s “Downstate” and two world premieres that are nominated both for outstanding play and outstanding new play: Buntport’s “Eyes Up, Mouth Agape” and Miners Alley Performing Arts Center’s “National Bohemians.”

“Downstate” is an unsparing look at a man who shows up at a post-incarceration group home to confront his childhood sexual abuser.

Buntport, a unique ensemble company that only presents original works of their own invention, collaborated with Boulder’s intentionally lower-cased square product theatre to create a comical fictional documentary poking fun at a very real 2004 incident — when the Dave Matthews Band tour bus released 800 pounds of human waste from a Chicago bridge onto a tour boat below it.

And Denver playwright Luke Sorge’s “National Bohemians” follows two brothers and an adopted sister who return home in a hurricane to deal with a family crisis involving their dad.

The Colorado Theatre Guild is a membership-based nonprofit. Its large pool of judges adjudicated 170 different productions by 57 member companies, resulting in nominations for 47 productions by 28 companies. The awards will be announced July 28 at the Lone Tree Arts Center.

Three years ago, the Colorado Theatre Guild took the extraordinary step of splitting most every category into two tiers based on the budget size of its member companies. (The dividing line between Tier 1 and 2 is an annual budget above and below $500,000.) Because Tier 1 companies are far fewer (23) than Tier 2 (94), the system lends itself to individuals earning multiple nominations. Most auspicious this year: Sound designer Max Silverman is the year’s only three-time nominee, for Creede Repertory Theatre’s “Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” and both the Arvada Center’s “A Gentleman’s Guide” and “Waitress.”

Among actors, Rocky Mountain Rep’s Tyler Symone landed an impressive quiniela: Nominations for leading actor in a big-budget musical for both “Come From Away” and “The Music Man.” The same company’s Mitchell Lewis was nominated for both “Kinky Boots” and “The Music Man.”

Colorado Springs actor Colton Pratt is nominated for his performances in Theatreworks’ “Henry IV and V” and “Sense and Sensibility.”

Rocky Mountain Rep boss Michael Querio will be competing against himself (and three others) for his direction of  “Come From Away” and “The Music Man.”

Kevin Copenhaver, whose longtime full-time job is Denver Center director of costume crafts, is nominated for two freelance gigs: The Arvada Center’s “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” and Lone Tree Arts Center’s “Million Dollar Quartet.”

Firehouse actor Kelly Uhlenhopp is nominated for her roles in both “Othello 2024” and “Perfect Arrangement.”

Jeff Duke directed two of the five musical nominees: Rocky Mountain Rep’s  “Come from Away” and “Kinky Boots.” He’s up against Sally Scott from the same company (“The Music Man”). Twenty years ago, she was a rising ingenue at the now long-closed Country Dinner Playhouse.

Sound designer CeCe Smith is nominated for Firehouse’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” and Give 5 Productions’ “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Lighting designer Brett Maughan is nominated for Performance Now’s “Fiddler on the Roof” and Give 5 Productions’ “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” Vance McKenzie managed to get himself nominated as both a large-budget lighting designer (for Miners Alley’s “National Bohemians”) and small-budget (for Performance Now’s “Joseph”).

Performance Now costume designer Susan Rahmsdorf-Terry achieved a double as well, for “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and “Pirates of Penzance.”

What else jumps out from the nominee list?

It was a strong year for Fort Collins companies, led by OpenStage with seven noms. Bas Bleu Theatre, which has not won a Henry Award since 2019, earned four noms, including nods for “The Trip to Bountiful” mother-and-son (on stage) co-stars Wendy Ishii and Mark Collins. They will duke it out along with 10 other nominees for leading performance in a small-budget play.

StageDoor Theatre in Conifer had a bit of a breakthrough year, earning four noms for “Sweeney Todd,” including three for acting.

It’s worth noting that five of the 10 nominated directors of plays or musicals identify as women. That makes 12 of the past 20 nominees in a field so normally dominated by men, only four of the 21 nominations before that went to women.

Who was overlooked?

Because of the large pool of shows considered for Henry Awards, there will always be those left on the outside looking in. Among the most glaring omissions, though, would have to be Candlelight Dinner Playhouse’s just-closed “Bright Star.” The last remaining major dinner theater in Colorado had pulled out of Henry Awards consideration in 2021 but returned to the fold this year, only to be shut out. Actors Jennasea Pearce (who was nominated for another show for another company) and Jazz Mueller were sublime. Director Steve Wilson and Music Director Mason Siders would have also seemed shoe-ins.

Littleton’s Town Hall Arts Center received just one nomination — for Megan Van De Hey’s performance in the suicide play “‘Night, Mother.” (She is the most-nominated actor in Henry Awards history.) This is a year when Town Hall produced one high-quality show after another, ranging from the sublimely silly “Cannibal the Musical” to the Irish musical “Once” to a definitive staging of “Jersey Boys.” That Jake Bell’s performance as Frankie Valli was not considered among the top 10 for the year — especially after being similarly ignored last year for his performance as Bobby Strong in “Urinetown” — will have some heads scratching this morning.

“Once” is a musical that requires nearly every performer to also play a musical instrument. Town Hall’s cast could be considered the prototype of what a best ensemble is, any yet it was not recognized.

Carbondale’s Thunder River, usually a Henry Award darling, was shut out, as were Boulder’s The Catamounts (“Ghost Quartet”) and Theatre Aspen, which stages Broadway-quality summer musicals. So too Vintage Theatre, which stages more shows than any theater in Colorado.

Some of the awards’ ongoing oversights appear to be institutional, with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival seemingly always passed over. In the first 18 years of the Henry Awards, the nation’s second-oldest Shakespeare festival has won just one Henry, and this year it earned just one nomination: Jacob Dresch, for his very funny performance as Falstaff in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” An intense take on “Macbeth” was shut out in what amounted to a halved, all-indoor season while the Mary Rippon Amphitheatre undergoes renovations. That lack of recognition has spurred much dialogue within the community over why judges seem to overwhelmingly favor contemporary theater over classical.

(It won’t make Colorado Shakes fans any happier to hear, but the Henrys have bestowed Leigh Miller’s 3-year-old “Shakespeare in the Wild” — which presents a story each summer in an open Littleton field — with three nominations for “Twelfth Night.”

If you saw “Downstate” at Curious, or “Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Macbeth” at Colorado Shakes), you might think actor Sean Scrutchins would have merited consideration for all three plays, but received no nods. And while Anne Terze-Schwarz was singled out for her starring role in the Arvada Center’s “Waitress” (perhaps the biggest no-brainer of the year), Marco Alberto Robinson was curiously overlooked for his performance as her charmingly quirky doctor (and love interest).

Phamaly, Denver’s disability-affirmative theater company, has not received a Henry Award nomination since “Chicago” in 2020. Last summer’s “A Chorus Line” was singularly sensational and “The 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” surprisingly affecting, but neither received nominations.

Curious, the closest thing Denver has to an off-Broadway-quality hometown theater company, was shut out beyond “Downstate,” despite an excellent “A Case for the Existence of God.” Su Teatro, Denver’s 51-year-old Chicano theater, has never received even one Henry Award nomination.

Theatre SilCo in Silverthorne chose not to participate.

Tickets to the July 28 awards ceremony will be available later this month at 720-509-1000 or lonetreeartscenter.org/events.