Victoria Clark is the 2026 recipient of the Sarah Siddons Society Award, the Chicago honor whose first recipient, in the 1952-53 season, was Helen Hayes. The society will present it at a benefit gala at The Arts Club of Chicago on November 9, with the proceeds going to its scholarships for theater students in the Chicago area.
The choice has a pleasing local logic. Clark's first Tony, in 2005, was for The Light in the Piazza, a performance Chicago audiences saw at the Goodman before it reached Lincoln Center Theater. Her second, in 2023, came for Kimberly Akimbo, playing a teenager with a condition that ages her body far faster than her years. She had already won the Lucille Lortel Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for the role in its Off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater Company, and the cast album brought her a Grammy nomination.
Her career began, as the society's own tribute recalls, with an audition after a single year of graduate school for the original production of Sunday in the Park with George. Thirteen Broadway plays and musicals have followed, among them the original companies of Sister Act and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella and the revival of Gigi.
She joins a roll of recent honorees that runs Beth Leavel (2025), Kelli O'Hara (2024) and Stephanie J. Block (2023), and, further back, Audra McDonald, Patti LuPone, Elaine Stritch and Chita Rivera.
The evening opens with a reception at 6pm, followed by the program at 7pm. Chicago radio host and comedian Patti Vasquez presents, and Marta Bady, Lillian Castillo, Marya Grandy and Heidi Kettenring will sing selections from Clark's shows, with music direction by Linda Madonia. Christopher Chase Carter and Christopher Pazdernik co-direct. The society will also induct its 2026 scholarship recipients. Individual tickets start at $225 on the Sarah Siddons Society's website.
New York audiences can see Clark now in Human Things at the West End Theatre, whose run was extended through October 30.
