Stage award records, season by season, 1955 to 2026

One season in this decade has no winners in any category. New York theatres were shuttered from March 2020 to September 2021, and the record says so rather than skipping the year.

Worth knowingThe blank season is kept in the index on purpose. A gap with a reason attached is more useful than a missing row.

Costume design splits, sound design splits, and Outstanding Fight Choreography arrives as its own award. The craft list reaches its widest point in the awards' history.

Worth knowingFight choreography getting its own heading is the clearest example of the pattern: a specialism gets named once enough productions employ a specialist.

Projection design appears. Unlike every other heading on the list it is not a craft that was previously going unrecognised — it is a job that did not exist until the equipment did.

Worth knowingLighting splits into musical and play in the same decade, following scenic design's example from the 1990s.

Scenic design divides into separate musical and play awards. It is the first sign of a pattern that runs for the next thirty years: one craft, then two headings, as the workload in each stops being comparable.

Worth knowingSet design also becomes scenic design here, which is why one designer's run can appear under three different category names.

Outstanding Sound Design appears for the first time. Music, lyrics and orchestration had been recognised for decades — writing the tune counted as authorship, getting it to the back row did not.

Worth knowingSound arrives 25 years after the awards began, 11 years after set design and 5 after lighting.

The decade the format changes. Nominee lists start being published alongside winners, so the record stops being a list of honourees and starts being a competition with runners-up.

Worth knowingAlso the decade of the "Most Promising" categories — book, composers, costume design — a habit the awards later dropped entirely.

The awards were renamed after the 1963-64 season, and the category list went from four headings to twenty-two inside ten years. The first craft heading of any kind, set design, finally appears in 1968-69.

Worth knowingSet design arrives 15 seasons in, costume design the season after, and lighting design not for another five. Before that, the people who built the show are simply absent from the record.

Not called the Drama Desk Awards at all. For its first decade the whole thing ran under the name of a New York Post theatre critic, and the category list was four headings long.

Worth knowingFour categories in total, and every name listed was an honouree — there were no shortlists to lose.