Two musicals receive the most nods for the 2016 Awards, while theatre bears up “in the face of dreadful funding cuts”.

Two musicals have led the nominations count for the 2016 Sydney Theatre Awards. Little Shop of Horrors, presented by Luckiest Productions and Tinderbox Productions in association with Hayes Theatre Co has received ten nominations, as has Spring Awakening, presented by Australian Theatre for Young People. Both shows have been nominated for Best Production of a Musical. Sport for Jove’s Antigone and Red Line Productions’ The Whale are not far behind with nine and eight nominations respectively.

The reviewers all felt 2016 was a strong but difficult year for theatre in Sydney. “The richness and quality of so much theatre this year has been an astonishing tribute to the resilience and generosity of our creative theatre artists,” said The Australian’s John McCallum. “This is in the face of dreadful funding cuts and, in the case of the independent sector, mostly no funding at all. That sector continues to rival, and in some cases surpass, the work of the mainstream sector. They have done this by the appallingly simple method of foregoing a decent income for themselves. There has been...