Donna McKechnie And Frank DiLella To Announce 2023 Drama Desk Award Nominations

The 67th Annual Drama Desk Awards will be held on Tuesday afternoon, June 6 at Sardi's Restaurant, it was announced today by Drama Desk co-presidents David Barbour and Charles Wright. The cutoff for this year's Awards is April 26.

The nominations will be announced on April 27 in the 12pm noon hour by NY1 "On Stage" host Frank DiLella and Broadway icon Donna McKechnie on Spectrum News NY1's "News All Day" with anchor Ruschell Boone.

The Drama Desk Awards are the only major New York City theater awards for which productions on Broadway, Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway compete against each other in the same categories.

For the first time, all performance categories will be gender-free. The updated gender-free categories are: Outstanding Leading Performance in a Play, Outstanding Leading Performance in a Musical, Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play, and Outstanding Featured Performance in a Musical.

Each of these categories will have twice as many nominees as the former gendered categories and voters will cast two votes for each category. These categories will also have two winners each. If there is a tie, there may be more than two winners in a category.

Additional details will be announced shortly.

What sets the Drama Desk Awards apart is that they are voted on and bestowed by theater critics, journalists, editors, and publishers covering theater. The Drama Desk Awards honor all aspects of New York's professional theater.

The 2022-2023 Drama Desk Nominating Committee is composed of: Martha Wade Steketee (Chair; freelance: UrbanExcavations.com), Linda Armstrong (New York Amsterdam News), Daniel Dinero (Theatre is Easy), Peter Filichia (Broadway Radio), Kenji Fujishima (freelance: Theatermania), Margaret Hall (Playbill) and Charles Wright, ex-officio.

The Drama Desk was founded in 1949 to explore key issues in the theater and to bring together critics and writers in an organization to support the ongoing development of theater in New York. The organization began presenting its awards in 1955, and it is the only critics' organization to honor achievement in the theater with competition among Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway productions in the same categories.