Airdrie's Torchlight Theatre didn't bring home any hardware from this year's Calgary Alliance of Community Theatres (CAT) awards but the group's Artistic Director believes the exposure they received will be a huge boost for the future.

Torchlight went into the awards on Saturday night (August 26) at the Rosa Centre in Calgary with seven nominations that included the night's biggest award of Best Production for their performance of Steel Magnolias.  

Chelsea Restall says the theatre group didn't pick up any awards and believes the fact that Torchlight is an Airdrie theatre company set them at a disadvantage.

"We had great audience numbers but we didn't necessarily have the CAT member society people coming out and seeing our show, we maybe had one or two whereas the other companies maybe had 15 or 20, so it gives us a deficit right off the top."

Restall says the way nominations work is that someone can put in a nomination if they've seen your show, whether they're a member of not.  The awards are selected is based on the members of the society seeing the shows and putting their vote in.  Most of the CAT members are from Calgary and didn't actually come out to the shows in Airdrie.

"Until we can start letting those Calgary people know that, 'hey, you know Airdrie has great theatre,' which I think this awards show will help to do because being nominated for seven awards all across the board, both technical and performance, will make people go, 'oh, maybe it's worth my time to drive out there,' because there is a mentality sometimes, when you're in Calgary, of 'why would I go outside of Calgary, I have everything I need.'  So you kind of have to educate people and entice them and prove to them that it's worth their while to come out and see a show that's only ten minutes north of Calgary.  I think it had some bearing on the fact we didn't win anything, but I think those that won were 100 per cent deserving."

Restall feels that once word gets out about Torchlight Theatre's productions, the group will become better known and she thinks being nominated for seven CAT awards will help.  

"We were at the Farmer's Market this summer and we were still coming across people in Airdrie that were like, 'oh, are you guys with Bert Church?' and it was like, no, no, no, we're our own company, we're based out of the Victory Church on the west side so we were still getting that information to the people who live in Airdrie, so it only makes sense that it takes time to build that reputation in Calgary.  I definitely think that this season of nominations will help to do that."

Questions, comments or story ideas? Email us at news@discoverairdrie.com