Last night’s 35^th annual Carbonell Awards ceremony had a curious, unscripted recurring theme -- actor Todd Allen Durkin’s private parts.

I guess we should have seen it coming -- the theme, not the naughty bits -- since he did appear full frontally nude in GableStage’s production of Blasted, the runaway award winner, and later was featured in Mosaic Theatre’s The Irish Curse, which talked about, but didn’t show, the genetic tendency of Irish men to have small genitals.

In any event, the evening began with a clever musical parody of Stephen Sondheim’s Art Isn’t Easy, with lyrics by Maribeth Graham reviewing the year in South Florida theater. In it, she made the first mention of Durkin’s penis -- following it with a very Sondheimian rhyme “between us” -- and many a presenter and recipient followed suit.

Picture Joe Adler and Avi Hoffman, the directors of the two above plays, discussing across the stage of the Broward Center’s Amaturo Theatre, the relative size of Durkin’s, um, Johnson. Alas, Durkin did not win a Carbonell for his Blasted performance, so he had no opportunity for a podium rebuttal, settling instead for a few shouted responses from the audience.

Later, when Gregg Weiner won for the year’s Best Actor in GableStage’s Fifty Words, he recalled his early acting training at New World School of the Arts, where he learned to “act with his balls.” That, too, quickly became a catch phrase of the evening.

Anyway, it was a big night for Blasted, the Sarah Kane play heavy with sexual and political perversions, which Adler called the most daring play he had ever produced. It won for Best Play Production, Best Director (Adler), Best Sound Design (Matt Corey), Best Scenic Design (Tim Connolly) and Best Lighting Design (Jeff Quinn).

Actors’ Playhouse of Coral Gables, perennial winner for its major musical productions, won for Miss Saigon, which was cited for Best Director (David Arisco), Best Actor in a Musical (Herman Sebek) and Best Musical Direction (Eric Alsford). In the evening’s chief surprise, though, it lost the Best Production of a Musical Carbonell to Broward Stage Door Theatre’s Mack and Mabel, the only award that show received.

Among Palm Beach County theaters, the Maltz Jupiter had a good night, pulling in four Carbonells for three different shows -- Best Ensemble (Twelve Angry Men), Best Actress, Musical (Tari Kelly, Anything Goes), Best Choreography (Marcia Milgrom Dodge, Anything Goes) and Best Costume Design (Jose M. Rivera, La Cage aux Folles).

Florida Stage demonstrated its ability to find and develop new plays, winning for Best New Work (Christopher Demos-Brown’s When the Sun Shone Brighter). It also was cited for two of its performers, Deborah L. Sherman (Best Supporting Actress, Play, Goldie, Max & Milk) and Nick Duckart (Best Supporting Actor, Musical, Dr. Radio).

Palm Beach Dramaworks went home with one award, Best Supporting Actor, Play (Will Connolly, Candida). The Caldwell Theatre was shut out, however, having gone into the evening with only one nomination.

Here is the complete list of competitive winners:

* Best Production of a Play -- Blasted, GableStage

* Best Production of a Musical -- Mack and Mabel, Broward Stage Door Theatre

* Best Director, Play -- Joseph Adler, Blasted

* Best Director, Musical -- David Arisco, Miss Saigon, Actors’ Playhouse

* Best New Work -- Christopher Demos-Brown, When the Sun Shone Brighter, Florida Stage

* Best Actor, Play -- Gregg Weiner, Fifty Words, GableStage

* Best Actress, Play -- Barbara Bradshaw, Collected Stories, Mosaic Theatre

* Best Actor, Musical -- Herman Sebek, Miss Saigon

* Best Actress, Musical -- Tari Kelly, Anything Goes, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

* Best Supporting Actor, Play -- Will Connolly, Candida, Palm Beach Dramaworks

* Best Supporting Actress, Play -- Deborah L. Sherman, Goldie, Max & Milk, Florida Stage

* Best Supporting Actor, Musical -- Nick Duckart, Dr. Radio, Florida Stage

* Best Supporting Actress, Musical -- Lisa Manuli, Motherhood the Musical, GFour Productions

* Best Musical Direction -- Eric Alsford, Miss Saigon

* Best Choreography -- Marcia Milgrom Dodge, Anything Goes, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

* Best Lighting Design -- Jeff Quinn, Blasted

* Best Scenic Design -- Tim Connolly, Blasted

* Best Costume Design -- Jose M. Rivera, La Cage aux Folles, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

* Best Sound Design -- Matt Corey, Blasted

* Best Ensemble -- Twelve Angry Men, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Tonight, the South Florida theater community gets together for the 35^th annual Carbonell Awards, the citations for excellence among area professional theaters that has been shrouded in controversy in recent years.

Last year, as you may recall, the awards board of directors announced the program would be suspended to study and fix the perceived deficiencies in the system.

Predictably, perhaps, the cry of outrage over not having the Carbonells was far louder than the yelps of disappointment over the way the awards were being run. So if the suspension was a ploy by the board to get the dissatisfied to appreciate what we have, it worked.

I can’t think of a single awards programs anywhere that hasn’t had problems and charges of inequities, and the benefits of having awards -- added media attention to resident theater, career boosts to winners, bragging rights for grant applicatons, etc. -- clearly outweigh not having them.

Going into tonight’s ceremony at the Broward Center’s Amaturo Theatre, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties each have 36 nominations, followed by Broward theaters’ 27.

Actors’ Playhouse of Coral Gables’s Miss Saigon pulled in the most nominations (11) of any production this year, and should be battling it out with the Maltz Jupiter’s La Cage aux Folles and Mack and Mabel at Broward Stage Door for Best Musical. Personally, I thought the Maltz’s standout production of Anything Goes deserved to be vying for the award, but while it did earn seven nominations -- two for director-choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge and three for the show’s performers -- Tari Kelly, Bret Shuford, Tom Beckett -- it failed to make the top award cut.

(Full disclosure: I am a Carbonell judge, which means I was one of seven people who traveled throughout South Florida last year, seeing the 42 shows that a larger group of recommenders agreed were award-worthy in some category. Then the judges met to discuss the merits of the performances, design work and productions to generate a slate of nominees. But the final vote by the judges is done by e-mail, so I am as in the dark about the eventual winners as anyone.)

The Best Play Carbonell looks to be a battle among Mosaic Theatre’s flawlessly performed Collected Stories; the controversial Blasted at GableStage, of which I wasn’t a fan; and Palm Beach Dramaworks’ American Buffalo. Here too, since we are quibbling, Dramaworks’ production of Freud’s Last Session is a puzzling no-show in this category.

Easier to project are the categories for Best Ensemble, which seems likely to be won by the Maltz’s 12 Angry Men and Best New Work, which should go to Christopher Demos-Brown’s When the Sun Shone Brighter at Florida Stage.

Unless I am wrong about the winners, which I usually am. In any event, you can read a full report of the event and the egregiously overlooked tomorrow right here.

Theater: Thanks to the business savvy of the Gershwin Estate, George and Ira Gershwin have written a few musicals after their deaths. Or rather, their vast song trunk has been made available to those who would reuse their familiar and obscure compositions in new settings, such as Crazy for You, a “new” show from 1992 that harkens back in style and score to the 1930s. The story concerns an affluent New Yorker who yearns to be a song-and-dance man, but is sent off to the sleepy town of Deadrock, Nev., to foreclose on a dormant theater. Of course, as these shows go, he falls in love instead. The Maltz Jupiter Theatre, which has had considerable success with large-scale musicals, keeps its string alive, thanks primarily to crafty choreographer Shea Sullivan and star-in-the-making leading man, Matt Loehr. Continuing through April 17. Call (561) 575-2223 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Film: As he showed is his earlier giddy tribute to the fair sex, 8 Women, French director Francois Ozon knows how to serve up froth. In his latest release, Potiche, he enlists the services of his country’s two great film icons, Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, in a slight, but affectionate comedy with economic and labor issues in the mix as well. Suzanne Pujol (Deneuve) is a “potiche,” a trophy wife to the owner-manager of an umbrella factory facing a worker strike. When her husband gets sidelined with a heart attack, she steps in and takes control of the plant, aided by the Communist-leaning mayor (Depardieu), who happens to be the hubby’s prime rival. Souffles like this are rarely served up with such style. At area theaters. – H. Erstein

Music: Caroline Goulding is one of the classical world’s legitimate rising stars, something that the Avery Fisher folks realized when in March they have a $25,000 Career Grant to the 18-year-old violinist from Port Huron, Mich. Her self-titled debut album has an unusual collection of short pieces from John Corigliano’s Red Violin Caprices to two Canadian folk fiddling tunes. Recorded performances reveal a violinist of great confidence and big technique who in her choices of material promises to be a musician who always will be worth watching. She solos today in the Bruch Concerto No. 1 in G minor (Op. 25) with Stewart Robertson and the Atlantic Classical Orchestra in two performances at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart. The shows are set for 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the theater. If you miss her, and you know someone at the Ocean Reef Cultural Center in Key Largo, you can catch her there April 7 when she plays the Mendelssohn Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra. Tickets for the 8 p.m. ACO concert are $45. Call 772-287-7627 or visit www.lyrictheatre.com.

Delray String Quartet: The Delray comes to the end of its seventh season this weekend with two works from the core repertory: The Schumann Quartet No. 2 (in F, Op. 41, No. 2) and the Tchaikovsky Quartet No. 2 (in F, Op. 22). The quartet, with its new second violinist Tomas Cotik, has had an interesting season that began with a contemporary American work (the Quartet No. 4 of Kenneth Fuchs) and reached rarities in its last concert with the Sibelius Piano Quintet and the Quartet No. 2 of Randall Thompson (both well-played). Sunday afternoon’s concert is set for 4 p.m. at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach (tickets: $35); the same program can be heard at 7:30 p.m. April 8 at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale, 4 p.m. April 10 at St. David’s-in-the-Pines Episcopal in Wellington, and at 4 p.m. April 17 at St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Coconut Grove. Call 213-4138 or visit www.delraystringquartet.com for more information.

Delray Beach Chorale: Eric Keiper’s community choir presents its spring concert this Saturday afternoon, with a performance of the Requiem of French composer Maurice Durufle leading a program that also includes the Dirait-t-on of the American choral specialist Morten Lauridsen. The choir is joined by the fine organist Matthew Steynor of Trinity Cathedral in Miami and an orchestra, and the audiences for this choir are always large and devoted. The concert is set for 3 p.m. Saturday at the First Presbyterian Church in Delray Beach, just shy of the sand and the ocean. Tickets are $20. Call 800-984-7282 for more information.

Following impressive performances at the Arsht Center, the Miami City Ballet’s production of Romeo and Juliet, which opens tomorrow at the Kravis Center, is quickly establishing itself as the company’s newest, and biggest, hit.

The company is mounting legendary South African choreographer John Cranko’s setting of the story, to the 1940 score by Sergei Prokofiev.

Part of the buzz generated comes as a result of the real-life lovebirds dancing the lead roles on opening night. Soloists Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra have been married for five years (officially on May 1) but have only been Romeo and Juliet for a weekend. But so far, they have given electrifying performances.

During a recent phone interview, Kronenberg struggled to find the words to describe the experience of doing this ballet with her husband. When she finally talks, she calls it “fulfilling,” and adds “probably the most special weekend I have ever experienced.”

That is to say a lot. She has danced plenty of beautiful roles, both contemporary and classical, but this role was magical for her, given the fact that the same rush Juliet experiences she too felt not so long ago.

Although the attention seems to revolve around the graceful pair, they are not the only ones committed to the lead characters in this production, which celebrates the company’s 25-year anniversary. Haiyan Wu, who played Juliet during the Saturday matinee at the Adrienne Arsht, embodied the innocence, youth and impulsiveness of this Shakespearean character just as well. In the arms of her Romeo (danced by Yann Trividic) she moved like a feather and carried out rehearsed gestures and reactions with a spontaneity that made them seem as if the thoughts had just entered her head.

The expression after receiving her first dress from her mother, Lady Capulet, (Act I) is of a jovial sheltered girl whose surroundings could not be more beautiful and safe. As the story evolves, the young girl finds herself making important grown-up decisions, such as marrying Romeo in secret.

By the third scene of Act III, Juliet contemplates whether to take the sleeping potion that would temporarily make her appear dead. She grabs the bottle, then drops it and moves away from it. She hesitates at the horror of what she is about to do and the suffering it would bring to her parents.

Then she remembers this is a small necessary sacrifice in order to be with Romeo forever. She drinks it and crawls back to bed.

The transformation Juliet undergoes from fragile to defiant, naïve to mature, made the role irresistible for Kronenberg. “She is so complex,” she said.

Acting is a very big part of this production, from the carnival clowns, whose synchronized steps make the audience laugh, to the authoritative figures of Verona, whose entrance to the stage is announced with Prokofiev’s commanding music. Funny marketplace exchanges, gossip, and sword duels provide an entertaining pause from the dreamy romantic spell achieved beautifully in several scenes including the balcony pas de deux.

Romeo, calling out to Juliet, appears strong and vulnerable at the same time. Juliet, still cautious, decides to follow her instincts. This is Kronenberg’s favorite scene.

Those attending should not expect the strong makeup, dark costumes or aggressive moves of a Swan Lake. That is Tchaikovsky’s tale of betrayal and deception. This is about a young impulsive love that refuses to be rationalized and keeps its promises. It is also about passion and loss.

There is no black-swan metamorphosis, nothing close to Giselle’s insanity and no explosive fouettés or any of the steps that traditionally let a dancer show off and get an audience on their feet. And that is the amazing thing: that considering the ballet has no single distinctive highlight, it still makes spectators stand up and remember it vividly long after the curtain falls.

At the absence of flamboyant displays and costumes the performance’s real strengths emerge. We then appreciate the light fabrics that seem to float around the stage, the music marrying the soft duets, the tender sequences and lifts, the backdrops. That it appears sweet and delicate does not mean this is an easy ballet to interpret. It takes a very skilled athlete or dancer, to make something look soft, effortless and relaxed.

Kronenberg says the role is physically challenging and requires great stamina, but above all, is very emotionally taxing.

All the sacrifice and risks seem to have paid off for the company. A poorly conceived set or miscalculation could have turned this production into a real tragedy. Fortunately, Edward Villella, the founding artistic director driving this group of 50 dancers, took careful steps. For Villella, it has never been about being reckless, which can turn into disaster, but being cautious, which could lead to extraordinary.

“My strategy was to proceed carefully and steadily, evolving rather than over-extending,” he writes in the program booklet. “Of course there’s never been enough money. Of course there have been countless crises, setbacks, heartaches. But slowly and surely we grew and prevailed.”

The production may not feature the sharpest leg extensions or wildest leaps, but still manages to convey great emotion. It makes us notice every single character and care about them.

If the flirtatious gypsies don’t get a kiss from the boys, no big deal. But when we see Juliet’s nurse anxiously looking for Romeo to hand him Juliet’s letter, we want to tell her Romeo is right there, in the left corner of the stage, lost in his thoughts of the young beautiful girl he has just met. We can see him. Can’t she? Instead, his partners in crime, friends Benvolio and Mercutio, point the way.

One of the sweetest scenes is the morning after their secret nuptials, when the lovers wake up locked in an embrace. This is how the second act opens and it draws an automatic unanimous response from the audience. The next time they lie together it will not be such a happy event. But in that moment, their love, lit by the sunrise, seems very real and pure. A conflicted Romeo, who has been ordered to leave Verona, is then seen struggling with the decision to leave Juliet behind.

Everything seems so well-structured that is hard to think of an instant that falls short. I ask Kronenberg instead, for any detail or event that deserves attention and could go unnoticed by the audience. She cannot think of anything but reminds me to always keep an eye on the corners of the stage or the background, where subtle things (a wink or a glance) usually happen while a major scene develops in the center.

I am confident I did not miss anything until Kronenberg mentions the Capulet House’s ball in the first act. Something else is going on with Romeo and Juliet, according to her.

“They are having a moment,” she says.

The Miami City Ballet’s production of Romeo and Juliet is set for 8 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, and 7 p.m. Sunday. The show then heads to the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale for performances from April 29-May 1. For Kravis tickets, call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

An alternative title of Potiche could have been Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. In this, the latest film from French directorial chameleon François Ozon, the men are the irrational ones – clingy, petulant and generally bewildered – while the film’s female protagonist, played by Catherine Deneuve, is the film’s rational, resolute, forward-thinking, confident and wholly electable moral center.

It’s never been surprising that women can be all of these things, of course, but in the ostentatiously sexist context of Potiche, set in the industrial 1970s, Deneuve’s muscular and intellectual outpacing of her male counterparts causes quite a stir.

Loosely adapted from a 1980s French play and staged largely in and around an umbrella factory full of disgruntled workers, Potiche looks at feminism and worker’s rights in an era that saw little of either. Fabrice Luchini plays Robert Pujol, the buffoonish, adulterous, antiunion proprietor of the factory who is all but overthrown by his deceptively airy trophy wife Suzanne (Deneuve). She gains a majority stake in the company and proceeds to properly compensate its workers and modernize its stock, with some help from her best frenemy: Gerard Depardieu, a Old Guard left-wing politician who’s as big as Michael Moore (in more ways that one: You need an awfully wide screen to frame Depardieu’s increasingly morbid girth).

Depardieu’s Maurice Babin had a fling with Suzanne in another life, and he’s since played the jilted lover as convincingly as the jaded leftist. When it’s revealed that Maurice may in fact be the father of Suzanne’s liberal son Laurent (Jérémie Renier), it creates more comic schisms in a family already divided by politics.

Potiche is reminiscent thematically – and only thematically – of the recent Made in Dagenham, another historical look at the nexus of women’s rights and labor rights. But unlike the preachy, humorless Dagenham, Potiche is as light and refreshing as a pinafore.

Joyously colorful, just like the loudest Almodovar films, Potiche is a loopy and self-conscious comedy that takes its serious thematic grounding and sends it soaring into a deliberately artificial cinematic landscape full of unusual editing transitions, a cartoony score and hilariously stilted flashbacks. It’s hard to take this lush fantasy too seriously when one of the first shots in the film is of fornicating squirrels, one of many images of nature’s bounty that enlivens Suzanne’s exercise route.

This film has received some of Ozon’s best theatrical distribution in some time, probably playing on the most screens since 2003’s erotic thriller Swimming Pool. It’s practically a wide release compared to his most recent features, Ricky and Hideaway, two tonally polarized takes on pregnancy and its aftershocks. In South Florida, these films only played short runs at the Tower Theatre and the Regal South Beach; Potiche, by contrast, sold out the substantial Gusman Center in March’s Miami International Film Festival and packed another house a few weeks later at the Palm Beach International Film Festival.

It’s easy to see why; it’s a charming audience movie, not very demanding on those with subtitle phobia, and equally rewarding for mass audiences and urbane cinephiles alike. Deneuve and Depardieu, the last lions of the ’70s French cinema mainstream, aren’t getting any younger, but they have a lot of fun satirizing politics, history and themselves under Ozon’s sardonic camera.

POTICHE. Distributor: Music Box Films; Director: Francois Ozon; Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard, Judith Godrèche, Jérémie Renier; in French with English subtitles. Rating: R; Opens: Friday; Venues: Regal Shadowood 16, Regal Delray Beach, Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth, COBB Jupiter 18, PGA Cinamax 6, Frank Gateway 4, Frank Theaters at Sunrise 11, Frank Intracoastal 8, Regal South Beach 18 and Coral Gables Art Cinema.