The final video in Upstaged’s exclusive Inner Circle series—documenting the speeches at this year’s New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards—captures an encounter to be treasured by all true fans of the American theater. In it, stage great Marian Seldes, who has been a mainstay of NYDCC ceremonies for many years, presents a Special Citation to her erstwhile Deuce costar, the monumentally classy Angela Lansbury. It was a magical moment, and one that we’re happy to be able to share with you today. Enjoy.

Today we continue our series of exclusive videos from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards reception last week. The two videos we have already shared—those for Best Play and Best Musical—convey some of that evening’s unusually emotional quality. Today’s selection is a different kind of treat, and captures the fun of one of the night’s most memorable presentations: that of the Special Citation to director Matthew Warchus and the cast of the Broadway revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests. Two members of the plays’ infamously factious original 1975 Broadway cast—Estelle Parsons and Carole Shelley—are currently back on the Great White Way (in August: Osage County and Billy Elliot, respectively), so I thought it would be neat to ask them to present this award together. Happily, they were both more than game, as this hilariously dishy video shows.

Yesterday, we shared exclusive video of the Best Play presentation at this week’s New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards ceremony at the Algonquin Hotel. Now we continue the series with the award for Best Musical, which went this year to Billy Elliot. Accepting the award on behalf of its English authors, Elton John and Lee Hall, was the musical’s very charming director, Stephen Daldry, who also helmed the film on which the show is based. Bit don’t skip right to his speech or you’ll miss a lovely intro by Ethan Stiefel, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre and dean of the School of Dance at the North Carolina School of the Arts. (Film buffs will recognize him as one of the stars of Center Stage.) Stiefel himself is a kind of American Billy Elliot—he was born in Pennsylvania coal country, and learned ballet at a small regional school—and here he shares a letter he received from a young dancer in Utah. As one of the press agents in attendance wrote me the next day: “I found that Billy Elliot speech very touching. Kind of reminds you why we’re in this.” Enjoy.

Every year since 1936, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle has given out awards to what it considers the best theater of the year. The awards ceremony and cocktail reception—attended by the city’s theatrical press agents as well as the critics and the award recipients and presenters—is a cozy industry affair, traditionally held at the Algonquin Hotel, where the group was founded in 1935. In olden days, the ceremony was broadcast live on the radio, but it has been many, many years since anyone not invited to the party could catch a glimpse inside. As president of the NYDCC since 2005, I have tried to make the workings of the Circle as transparent as possible—creating a website with photos of the members, for example, and posting the full details of our annual voting meeting as soon as it has concluded. So it is with great pleasure that I also revive the early tradition of inviting the public (now via video instead of radio) into the Circle’s annual party.

We have recorded the entire ceremony in four installments, which we will be unveiling here daily for the next week or so. First up is the award for Best Play, which went to Lynn Nottage for Ruined. My intro here is truncated—there were some microphone problems—so what you need to know is that the presenter of the award is none other than the playwright and Yale professor Paula Vogel, who won the NYDCC Award herself in 1997 for How I Learned to Drive, and who taught Nottage at Brown University many years ago. Both Vogel’s intro and Nottage’s reaction were quite moving. We hope you enjoy this sneak peek, and the others to come.