2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards
2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards
Broadway Legend Joined: 3/30/17
2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards#1
Posted: 5/1/26 at 12:28am
2025-2026 season winners :
The New York Drama Critics' Circle has awarded:
- Best Play - Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road
- Best Musical - No award given.
- Best Individual Performance - Alden Ehrenreich of Becky Shaw
- Best Ensemble Performance - the cast of Death of a Salesman.
Special Citations:
- Lincoln Center Theater revival of Ragtime;
- Wallace Shawn and André Gregory for career achievement
- Qween Jean for the costume design of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Liberation and Saturday Church.
2024-2025 season winners :
- Best Play - Purpose (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins)
- Best Musical - Maybe Happy Ending (Will Aronson and Hue Park)
- Best Individual Performance - Dead Outlaw (Itamar Moses, David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna)
- Best Ensemble Performance - The cast of Liberation
Special Citations:
- Cole Escolar for Oh, Mary!
- Cats: The Jellicle Ball
- David Greenspan for lifetime achievement
The New York Drama Critics’ Circle comprises 22 drama critics from daily newspapers, magazines, wire services and websites based in the New York metropolitan area. The New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, which has been awarded every year since 1936 to the best new play of the season (with optional awards for foreign or American plays, musicals and special achievements), is the nation's second-oldest playwriting award, after the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/LITTLE-BEAR-RIDGE-ROAD-Named-Best-Play-AtNew-York-Drama-Critics-Circle-Awards-20260430
2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards#2
Posted: 5/1/26 at 3:25am
“On the first ballot for Best Musical, Mexodus and Schmigadoon! earned the most votes but no show approached a majority. On the second ballot, divided Circle decided not to award Best Musical this season.”
Interesting. These are the counts for musical on the first ballot:
Mexodus - 6
Schmigadoon! - 5
Lost Boys - 3
Two Strangers - 2
No Singing in the Navy, Saturday Church, Night Side Songs - 1
And then three abstentions (including the GOAT Sara Holdren for some reason)
2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards#3
Posted: 5/1/26 at 4:48am
These awards match pretty well with the board consensus, including the shrug over what should be the best musical.
2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards#4
Posted: 5/1/26 at 11:59am
I did not realize that Little Bear Ridge Road got such good reviews. Was Liberation eligible last year?
I do not remember there being a performance award. Is this new or recent, or have I been living in a bubble?
It must be quite a feather in Alden E's cap to win the award in a year that has so many great performances in leading roles. (I have not seen his play, so I don't know how large his role is). Given the acclaim that John Lithgow and Joshua Henry and Daniel Radcliffe and Mark Strong and Leslie Manville received (off the top of my head) -- I assume the cast award for Death made Lane and Metcalf ineligible for individual performance -- it is quite impressive. I was pleased with his reviews because I think he has been underappreciated in movies because of that Han Solo fiasco...I don't know how anyone could have survived that awful movie.
2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards#5
Posted: 5/1/26 at 12:16pm
Interesting that of the eligible Broadway musicals, it's Schmigadoon with the most support from the critics. Critics make up a minuscule number of the Tony voter pool, and the third viable best musical winner in the mix, Titanique, was not eligible. But I do see this as a bit of a bellweather in an awards system that is idiosyncratic and not the best for predictions. The DCC do tend to have a good track record of awarding musicals that go on to win Best Musical and, as critics, their opinion carries some amount of weight. In the last 15 years, they've only awarded four musicals that did not go on to win best musical: Matilda, Shuffle Along, Tootsie, and Dead Outlaw. (Their awards don't always align with the Tonys because they include off-broadway and have awarded shows that then went on to transfer and win, like Hamilton and Band's Visit, which allowed Shuffle Along and Tootsie to win those years).
This being said, I'm surprised they opted for no winner instead of coalescing around Mexodus as a consensus. It looks like they haven't awarded an off-Broadway production that did not transfer since 1997 with Violet.
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2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards#6
Posted: 5/1/26 at 1:34pm
Yeah, very interesting that Mexodus or Schmigadoon couldn't pull through in a second round of voting. Then again, the two most voted on shows could not be more different from each other, so I suppose an impasse could be possible. I'm not seeing someone who voted for Mexodus swinging to Schmigadoon or vic versa on a second ballot.
2026 New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards#7
Posted: 5/1/26 at 3:42pm
You guys inspired me to do a bit of a deep dive into the Best Musical precedent, for anyone interested:
https://reddit.com/r/Broadway/comments/1t11gj7/new_york_drama_critics_circle_winners_ballots_and/
Videos
