Today, Seth Rudetsky and James Wesley announced the nominations for the 65th annual Drama Desk Awards on the afternoon edition of their Stars in the House livestream. The 2020 awards will be presented remotely in a virtual ceremony on May 31. Three musicals received the most nominations overall: Soft Power (11), The Wrong Man (9), and Octet (8).
The nominees for outstanding musical — all Off-Broadway productions — are Octet (which ran May 19-June 30, 2019, at Signature Theatre), The Secret Life of Bees (which ran June 13-July 21, 2019, at Atlantic Theater), Soft Power (which ran Oct. 15-Nov. 17, 2019, at the Public Theater), A Strange Loop (which ran June 17-July 28, 2019, at Playwrights Horizons), and The Wrong Man (which ran Oct. 7-Nov. 24, 2019, at MCC Theater).
The nominees for outstanding revival are the 1982 Menken & Ashman musical Little Shop of Horrors (which opened Off-Broadway Oct. 17, 2019, at the Westside Theatre), the 1960 Meredith Willson musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown (which ran Off-Broadway Feb.8-26, 2020, at Transport Group), and the 1957 musical West Side Story (which opened Feb. 20, 2020, on Broadway).
The nominated composers are Ross Golan (The Wrong Man), Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop), Dave Malloy (Octet), Joshua Rosenblum (Einstein’s Dreams), Duncan Sheik (The Secret Life of Bees), and Jeanine Tesori (Soft Power).
The nominated lyricists are Susan Birkenhead (The Secret Life of Bees), Adam Gwon (Scotland, PA), Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop), Joanne Sydney Lessner and Joshua Rosenblum (Einstein’s Dreams), Dave Malloy (Octet), and Mark Saltzman (Romeo & Bernadette).
The book writers nominated are David Henry Hwang (Soft Power), Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop), Dave Malloy (Octet), Lynn Nottage (The Secret Life of Bees), Mark Saltzman (Romeo & Bernadette), and Dick Scanlan (The Unsinkable Molly Brown).