Katie Holmes will this week begin starring in a Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that has not been staged in New York for 20 years. Almost as much time has passed since the actress last appeared on a red carpet–it was technically in March but six months feel like decades in Hollywood time–with Holmes posing at press night in stylist Brie Welch’s latest coup: an aqueous Heirlome blouse and thigh-slit column skirt with elaborate Reza drop earrings.
This is an almost like-for-like rendition of the outfit Holmes wore to the Roundabout Theatre Company gala: a draped Brandon Maxwell silk dress with floral appliqué Magda Butrym pumps. It of course helps to have a style template, and that includes last night’s steel-toed kitten heels, the latest in a long line of Holmes’s quirked-up red carpet steppers, spanning running shoes to nib-heeled mules.
Her first stage role in 12 years, Holmes marked her grand comeback with a series of excitable Instagram stories, all “Wow!!!”s and P!nk lyrics and “Love these beautiful people so much!!!” (You can take a small-town theatre kid to Broadway and style them in all-black fashions and even slick back their hair into a Kim Kardashian wet-look wave, but the earnestness will always remain.)