Drama Desk Award

The Drama Desk Awards are presented annually, by The Drama Desk Organisation and was first awarded in 1955, to recognize excellence in New York theatre productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway. Broadway productions were excluded until the 1968–69 award season. The awards are considered a significant American theatre distinction.

History

The Drama Desk organization was formed in 1949 by a group of New York theater critics, editors, reporters and publishers, in order to make the public aware of the vital issues concerning the theatrical industry. They debuted the presentations of the Vernon Rice Awards. The name honors the New York Post critic Vernon Rice, who had pioneered Off-Broadway coverage in the New York press. The name was changed for the 1963–1964 awards season to the Drama Desk Awards.

In 1974, the Drama Desk became incorporated as a not-for-profit organization. In 1975, the Drama announcement of winners included the nominees as well.

The Drama Desk has more than 140 members, including theatre critics, reporters and editors who vote on the awards.

Cynthia Nixon

Cynthia Ellen Nixon (born April 9, 1966) is an American actress, known for her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City (1998–2004), for which she won the 2004 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She reprised the role in the films Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010). Her other film appearances include Amadeus (1984), The Pelican Brief (1993), Baby's Day Out (1994), Little Manhattan (2005), 5 Flights Up (2014), Stockholm, Pennsylvania (2015), and James White (2015).

Nixon made her Broadway debut in the 1980 revival of The Philadelphia Story. Other Broadway credits include The Real Thing (1983), Hurlyburly (1983), Indiscretions (1995), and The Women (2001). In 2005, she played Eleanor Roosevelt in the HBO TV film Warm Springs. She went on to win the 2006 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the original production of Rabbit Hole, a second Emmy Award in 2008 for her guest role in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2009 for An Inconvenient Truth. In 2011, she played Michele Davis in the TV film Too Big to Fail, before returning to Broadway in the 2012 play Wit. She is set to star as Emily Dickinson in the upcoming film A Quiet Passion.

Jenn Colella

Jenn Colella (born Jennifer Lin Colella; September 22, 1974) is an Italian American comedienne, actress, and singer. She first began her career in Los Angeles as a comedienne and later branched out to musical theater. She had her Broadway debut with a 2003 performance as Sissy in Urban Cowboy, which earned her a 2003 Outer Critic's Circle Award nomination. Colella went on to star in High Fidelity and Chaplin. Her off-Broadway credits include Closer Than Ever and Slut! the Musical, and Side Show.

In 2014, she returned to Broadway in Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s If/Then directed by Michael Greif.

Early life

Colella was born in Charleston, South Carolina on September 22, 1974 to Lindy Crawford and Mick Colella. She grew up in Summerville, South Carolina and attended Columbia College as an undergraduate, where she graduated with a dual degree in speech and drama. During this time she served as a company member of the Trustus Theater. Colella went on to attend the University of California, Irvine, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Acting. After graduate school Colella remained in Los Angeles, during which time she pursued a career into standup comedy and performed at the Laugh Factory and other comedy clubs in the area.

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of narrative, typically fictional, represented in performance. The term comes from the Greek word δρᾶμα, drama, meaning action, which is derived from the verb δράω, draō, meaning to do or to act. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception. The early modern tragedy Hamlet (1601) by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus the King (c. 429 BC) by Sophocles are among the masterpieces of the art of drama. A modern example is Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) by Eugene O’Neill.

The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. They are symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia and Melpomene, the Muse of comedy represented by the laughing face, and the Muse of tragedy represented by the weeping face, respectively. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BC)—the earliest work of dramatic theory.

Andy Karl

Andy Karl (born Andrew Cesewski) is an American actor and singer, best known for performing in musical theatre. He has appeared on Broadway in the original productions of Legally Blonde, 9 to 5, and Rocky the Musical, as well as appearing in Wicked, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Jersey Boys, On The Twentieth Century, and And So It Goes.

Early life

Andy Karl was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1973 to Walter Cesewski and Susan Weisman. He attended Towson High School, where he was on the football team and performed in theater. In high school he played Jud Fry in Oklahoma! and General Bullmoose in Li'l Abner. At age 16 he performed as the title role in Aladdin at the White Marsh Dinner Theatre. After high school he attended Towson State University, where he studied voice and music. Karl originally planned on becoming a voice teacher until the director of a show he was in at college told him he had what it took to be a professional actor. Karl continued to perform in shows while in college. In Winter 1993–1994, he played the 7½ foot dragon in the children's musical The Reluctant Dragon at Toby's Dinner Theatre in Columbia, Maryland.