CAT awards return, community theatre in Calgary thrives

Calgary’s community theatre companies are heading into awards season with the CAT Awards on Saturday, Aug. 30. The event is hosted by Calgary ACTS, the umbrella association for local community theatre companies.

Community theatre in Calgary is a not-for-profit pursuit. It can be a place to learn new skills, fine tune old ones, or most importantly, a chance to just play for the love of it.

This year’s numbers highlight just how active the sector is in Calgary:

• 21 member companies are part of Calgary Acts, the umbrella group for community theatre.

• 41 productions were staged between September 2024 and June 2025.

• 108 nominees from 24 productions are up for recognition at the 2025 CAT Awards.

But, that’s not at all a complete picture of just how many Calgarians give how many hours to produce the shows.

Calgary Acts president Kyle Gould says auditions regularly draw triple-digit turnouts, with some shows narrowing from more than 100 hopefuls to a cast of 16.

Standout companies in this year’s CAT Award nominations include Front Row Centre Players, Morpheus Theatre, and Untold Stories Theatre — all earning nominations in the double digits. Workshop Theatre, Full Circle Theatre, the Claresholm Arts Society, and Feather Pen Theatre also made a strong showing, each with more than five nods.

While it gets less of the limelight, community theatre matches and often outpaces Calgary’s professional stages in sheer participation and production counts. The Betty Mitchell Awards, the professional awards,  for example, nominated 20 productions across 10 companies this year. By comparison, the CAT Awards recognize 24 productions across 13 companies.

And several faces in the professional theatre community will attend both awards shows this year.

Gould says the strength of community theatre lies in its mix of people and purpose, and while the labour is often free- that doesn’t mean the productions are not as impressive. “Many times you’ll see a community production that just wows you. You’d swear it was on the ATP stage,” Gould said.

This season’s nominations include large-scale musicals like Sweeney Todd, staged with a 20-piece orchestra and an 80-person volunteer production team, alongside smaller plays from new companies such as Incendiary Festival, which focuses on devised works in found spaces like Fish Creek Park.

Gould points out one challenge that hasn’t gone away: finding places to perform. “Community theatre largely relies on 150–200 seat spaces,” he said. “Too small and you can’t sustain a run, too large and even a hundred people in the audience feels empty.” Most companies rely on venues like the Pumphouse Theatre, Lantern Church, or C-Space, while others turn to schools or unconventional sites. Increasingly, smaller professional companies are competing for the same spaces.

One event that doesn’t have a hard time selling is The CAT Awards themselves, which has already sold out. The awards color and brighten the season itself,” Gould said. “It’s one of the only ways we can memorialize what occurred in a given year”.

Calgary ACTS is already preparing for the year ahead, with 37 shows confirmed for the 2025–26 season.