By Kenneth Jones
30 Oct 2009

Tony Award-winning Spring Awakening director Michael Mayer will co-direct the Drama League's 2010 all-star benefit gala, A Musical Celebration of Broadway, which will honor five-time Tony Award winner Angela Lansbury.

The performance (with participants yet to be announced) is Feb. 8, 2010, at the Pierre New York. Public tickets are available by calling (212) 244-9494 ext. 5 or visiting www.dramaleague.org.

A Musical Celebration of Broadway, a black-tie event, will be held in the Grand Ballroom at The Pierre New York (2 East 61st Street at 5th Avenue).

The show will be co-directed by Tony Award winner Mayer and his Spring Awakening associate director Beatrice Terry. Mayer's next Broadway project is the Green Day musical American Idiot.

Lansbury has enjoyed a career in motion pictures, television and theatre. She appeared most recently on Broadway as Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, for which she received her fifth Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards; and in 2006 in Terrence McNally's Deuce, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award. She made her Broadway debut in 1957 starring as Bert Lahr's wife in the French farce, Hotel Paradiso.

Her stage credits include Broadway's A Taste of Honey, Anyone Can Whistle, Mame (Tony Award as Best Actress in a Musical), Dear World (Tony), Gypsy in 1972 (Tony) and Sweeney Todd (Tony).

This fall, she will return to Broadway in the role of Madame Armfeldt in the revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, co-starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Each year, The Drama League's one-night-only gala concert "boasts an incredible roster of Broadway's biggest and brightest stars, performing favorite songs from Broadway seasons past and present," according to the not-for-profit industry support group.

The festive 2010 evening will begin at 7 PM with a cocktail reception and silent auction/raffle in the Pierre's Cotillion Room, followed by an elegant seated dinner at 8 PM in the Grand Ballroom, followed by the performance.

All proceeds from A Musical Celebration of Broadway support The Drama League, which was founded in 1916 as an association of theatre professionals and patrons dedicated to encouraging the finest in professional theatre and has since then developed into the theatre's premiere service organization.

Tickets for A Musical Celebration of Broadway are $750-$1,995. Tables of ten are available from $7,500-$18,000.

For more information, visit www.dramaleague.org.