

He received honorary degrees from the Juilliard School and NYU.

In addition to the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, his other honors include the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award (2011) and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award (2015). He was the recipient of five Tony Awards, and he also won an Emmy and several Obie and Drama Desk awards.

Over the course of a career spanning six decades, Terrence McNally’s prolific output included opera librettos, ten books for musicals, over 37 plays, and a variety of screenplays for film and television.

“Simply put, Terrence McNally was a brilliant artist who loved opera nearly as much as the opera world loved him,” Derrer said. We have Terrence to thank for the inspiration.” “There is no doubt that the 2010 world premiere of Moby-Dick, which so magnificently concluded The Dallas Opera’s inaugural season in the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, was a game-changer for the company. McNally’s imprint on The Dallas Opera began even earlier,” Derrer explained. “It was truly our privilege to bring this ‘operatic love letter’ to life. “Terrence McNally’s libretto for Great Scott was dazzling in its scope and ambition, yet filled with the warmth and humanity that characterized so many of his best works,” he said. Ian Derrer, The Dallas Opera’s Kern Wildenthal general director and CEO, said that McNally’s long-term impact on the company had been extraordinary, thus honoring the literary lion with TDO’s most important award was particularly fitting. Terrence McNally, the legendary American playwright, screenwriter, and librettist will posthumously receive The Dallas Opera’s most prestigious honor, “The Maria Callas Award,” in recognition of his contribution to two landmark events in the company’s history: McNally wrote the libretto for Jake Heggie’s Great Scott, which received its world premiere at TDO in 2015 and he was a major creative force behind the creation of Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick, which had its world premiere on the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House stage in 2010.
