The Theater Category of the 2024 Emmy Awards – New York Theater

Among the dozens of categories in the 76^th The Emmy Awards, broadcast live on ABC tonight, are effectively a theater award. But only virtually, not officially. Three of the nominations in the Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special category were for shows originally performed on a New York stage, one of which won a Tony Award.

And four of the five nominees in this category are stand-up comedians who also perform (or part-time?) as theater artists. (The fifth nomination is for the many writers at the 2024 Academy Awards.)

Update: Alex Edelman won the Emmy.

Alex Edelman sang “Just for Us” Off-Broadway at Cherry Lane in 2021, then transferred to Broadway for two months last year, where Edelman won a Special Tony Award. The film was filmed at Broadway's Hudson Theater for an HBO special currently playing on Max. The first few seconds show Edelman rushing from his dressing room through the backstage area and onto the stage to begin yeshiva-educated Edelman's witty true story of attending a meeting of white supremacist anti-Semites in Queens. (My reviews of Just for Us Off-Broadway and on Broadway.)

Jacqueline Novak sang “Get On Your Knees” off-Broadway in 2019, also at Cherry Lane. The piece moved to the larger Lortel and was performed a few times as an encore. Netflix filmed her performance at Town Hall, showing her entering from the street, drinking a glass of water, then bracing herself for her entrance to enthusiastic applause and immediately launching into her parody of oral sex. “I'm going to talk about the blow job quite a bit tonight, 'to the point of boredom,' said a previous critic.” She actually talks about other things. She's an intellectual, she explains, so “anything below my chin is beneath me.”

Although Mike Birbiglia premiered his previous solo show, The New One, at Cherry Lane before it went to Broadway, Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man & The Pool, his fifth comic monologue went straight to Broadway for a two-month run in 2022. Netflix filmed the show at Broadway's Vivian Beaumont Theater, beginning with an exterior shot of Lincoln Center and a time-lapse shot of the audience inside quickly taking their seats. Against a set that looks like a cross between a swimming pool and a medical chart, Birbiglia improvises about his lifelong aversion to exercise and his history of serious health problems, which collide when his doctor orders him to go to the gym. It occurred to me that the title is reminiscent of the title of Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea and can equally be interpreted as a fight against death, only it's funny.

The fact that all three of these artists have performed at the Cherry Lane Theater may explain why film studio A24 recently purchased this century-old off-Broadway theater.

John Early's “Now More Than Ever” grew out of a one-off performance at Brooklyn's Roulette Intermedium that was filmed for Max and became a combination stand-up show, rock concert, and mock backstage documentary. Although Early is best known for his television roles (“Search Party”), he was one of the first hosts of Showgasm on Ars Nova.

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