Bernadette Peters will receive the Harold S. Prince Award, the Drama Desk’s lifetime honor, when the 2027 Drama Desk Awards are presented at The Shed on Sunday, May 23, and the evening will include a tribute to her career.
The honor, reported by BroadwayWorld, goes to an artist whose body of work has had a lasting effect on the theater. David Barbour and Charles Wright, the Drama Desk’s co-presidents, described Peters as “the absolute gold standard of American theater,” and added: “We are thrilled to honor her with the 2027 Harold Prince Award.”
Her association with the awards goes back almost six decades. Peters was first nominated in 1968, for Dames at Sea, and won that year; she is now the most nominated performer in Drama Desk history, with nine nominations and three wins. Song and Dance brought her both a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award, and Annie Get Your Gun a second Tony, with the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award later recognizing her charity work.
The rest of her award history shows the range: Tony nominations for Mack and Mabel, On the Town, The Goodbye Girl and Sunday in the Park with George, and a Drama Desk nomination as the Witch in Into the Woods. Her later stage work includes Gypsy, A Little Night Music, Follies, Hello, Dolly! and the Encores! production of A Bed and a Chair. Most recently she appeared in Cameron Mackintosh’s Old Friends, which took her from a West End debut to Los Angeles and then to an extended Broadway engagement in the spring of 2025.
Earlier recipients of the award include Tom Schumacher, Gavin Creel, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Alice Childress, as well as Harold S. Prince himself. Founded in 1955, the Drama Desk considers Broadway, Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway work on equal terms. The 2027 ceremony at The Shed, 545 West 30th Street, is produced by Victoria Weinberg for Drama Desk Awards Productions, in partnership with The Season.
