1993-1994 award record

An Inspector Calls, which takes two of the five awards here, was Stephen Daldry's National Theatre production of the J. B. Priestley play. Its Broadway transfer opened at the Royale Theatre on 27 April 1994.

Ian MacNeil had already won the 1993 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Set Designer for the same staging, and he wins the set award on this page too, alongside Rick Fisher's lighting for the same production.

The season's other three awards are spread wide: choreography to Jane Elliott and Kenneth MacMillan for Carousel, costume design to Howard Crabtree for Whoop-Dee-Doo!, and sound design to John A. Leonard for Medea.

Passion, Stephen Sondheim's musical, drew three nominations this season — costume, lighting and set design — without converting any of them into an award, the widest nominated spread of any non-winning production that year. The Lights matches it with three of its own, across lighting, set and sound design, also without a single win.

Medea connects to two categories rather than one: John A. Leonard's sound design win is covered already, but the same production was also nominated for set design, by Peter J. Davison — a second credit for a show this page otherwise records only as a single winning entry.

Beauty and the Beast, Disney's first Broadway musical and a commercial success that ran for over five thousand performances, drew two nominations this season, for choreography and sound design, without converting either into a win — a large commercial hit that this record shows losing on the craft side even as it succeeded at the box office.

Jane Greenwood, nominated for costume design on Passion, recurs across seven seasons of this record despite not converting this particular nomination into a win. Bob Mackie, nominated the same season for The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, is a costume designer far better known for television and concert work than for the three Broadway seasons this record connects him to.

Twenty-four total entries connect to fifteen distinct productions this season. Three — Carousel, Passion and The Lights — each account for three of them, more than any other show; nine more productions appear only once each, the long tail behind the season's handful of repeated names. Reading that tail shows how thin most individual production credits actually run here, once the repeated names are set aside.

The nine single-credit productions this season include All's Well That Ends Well and In the Summer House, both nominated once and winning nothing — the ordinary case on this page, against which the three-credit productions stand out as the exception rather than the rule.

Sources: An Inspector Calls, Beauty and the Beast (musical), Bob Mackie