The Stage

Billy Elliot begins US prize haul with Critics’ Circle Award

Published Friday 8 May 2009 at 11:11 by Judd Hollander

Hot on the heels of receiving a record-tying 15 Tony Award nominations, a total matched only by Mel Brooks’ The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical this week received the award for Best Musical from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle.

The Awards will be presented at a private ceremony at New York’s Algonquin Hotel on May 11. Winning for Best Foreign Play was Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, a holdover from last year, which had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006. A production of the National Theatre of Scotland, Black Watch had its US premiere in New York in the fall of 2007, playing a return engagement a year later.

Taking the prize for Best Play was the Off-Broadway work Ruined, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The award for Best Play comes with a check prize of $2,500, while the winner for the Best Foreign Play gets a prize of $1,000. Ruined won its category handily on the first ballet. It took both Billy Elliot and Black Watch three rounds of voting to win in their respective areas.

The NYDCC also awarded three special citations - to actress Angela Lansbury for her contribution to the American Theatre, to the cast of the Norman Conquests, which originated at London’s Old Vic before moving to Broadway, and to composer Gerard Alessandrini for his numerous revues of Forbidden Broadway, which has been performed in various incarnations since 1982 and has toured both nationally and internationally.

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle was founded in 1935 by such critics as Robert Benchley, Brooks Atkinson and Walter Winchell. The second oldest theatre award in the United States, after the Pulitzer Prize, the NYDCC has presented an award annually to the Best New Play of the season every year since 1936.