At Home in New York, Anna Wintour and Bee Carrozzini Toasted a Groundbreaking Season for the New York Theater
Early on Monday evening, a day after the Drama Desk Awards and six days prior to the 78th Tonys, a parade of actors, writers, and directors—brilliant theater-makers all—streamed into Anna Wintour’s Manhattan townhouse for her festive annual dinner with Bee Carrozzini, toasting the best-loved productions of the season. In most respects, this year’s celebration followed the traditional format: cocktail hour on the parlor floor; a cozy seated dinner; remarks from the hostesses, heralding their “favorite event of the year”; and then a dessert course of sorbet and jaunty production-themed cakes, designed by Charlotte Neuville in collaboration with Alisa Forbes and Daniel Colonel. But with 2025 marking this party’s tenth (!) anniversary, photographer Hunter Abrams leaned into the sense of occasion, transforming the house’s shaded back garden into a full-fledged portrait studio.
Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that this is a group that knows exactly how to hit their mark; the gathering’s earliest arrivals, Adrienne Warren (a sensational Cathy in the debut Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years), Helen J Shen (a revelation in Maybe Happy Ending, the hit musical of the season), and Taylor Trensch (a highlight of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s gorgeous revival of Floyd Collins at Lincoln Center Theater), made that clear right away. Following just behind was Jasmine Amy Rogers, sporting the glamorous blond bob (crafted by Sabana Majeed, Rogers’s hairstylist for Boop! The Musical) that she’d appeared in the night before, when she and Audra McDonald tied for a Drama Desk…no big deal. “When they announced my name, I was like, ‘Oh, my God’—and I went to run to her,” Rogers recalled, beaming. “She is so incredible.” (It’s not for nothing that one of her all-time favorite Tony performances involves a pregnant McDonald—and a not pregnant, but no less luminous Warren—tap-dancing with abandon during a number from Shuffle Along.)
As the clock struck 7:00 p.m., arrivals picked up at speed. Cole Escola—who, in the span of some 15 months, went from making their off-Broadway debut at the Lucille Lortel to becoming a multiple Tony nominee with the raucously ribald Oh, Mary!—caroused with their Thom Browne-clad director, Sam Pinkleton. A rosy-cheeked Danny Burstein—the extremely endearing Herbie in George C. Wolfe’s celebrated revival of Gypsy—greeted his Louise, Joy Woods (a vision in draped, ruched, and feathered Lapointe). Elsewhere, the John Proctor Is the Villain contingent—Sadie Sink, Fina Strazza, and Gabriel Ebert, along with playwright Kimberly Belflower and director Danya Taymor—closed ranks and giggled; English scribe Sanaz Toossi shared a quiet moment with star Tala Ashe; and Just in Time’s Gracie Lawrence, wearing a Dries Van Noten jacket, Comme des Garçons shirt, ballooning Coperni skirt, and Alaïa heels, told me how excited—not nervous!—she was for Sunday’s Tonys ceremony, with Cynthia Erivo as the host: “I’m such a Cynthia fan, I would have snuck in anyway.”
The directors in attendance being some of the best (and the busiest) in the business, it was a trick to keep track of just who had helmed what—not least because several were pulling double or triple duty, like David Cromer (of both Dead Outlaw and Good Night, and Good Luck), Taymor (her next show, the buzzy Trophy Boys, begins previews later this week; “We did two rounds of it yesterday, and it’s really, really cool,” she enthused), and Saheem Ali (of Buena Vista Social Club, Goddess at the Public Theater, and then, in August, Twelfth Night in Central Park’s newly renovated Delacorte Theatre). Others had a bit more time between productions: Sam Gold, who mounted a thoroughly modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet at the Circle in the Square Theatre last fall, is now in previews with Penelope Skinner’s Angry Alan, starring John Krasinski, at Studio Seaview, Manhattan’s newest off-Broadway theater; and this fall, Michael Arden (Maybe Happy Ending) will finally bring The Queen of Versailles—the much-touted latest collaboration between Kristin Chenoweth and Stephen Schwartz—to Broadway’s St. James Theatre.
Of course, they weren’t the only people savoring a break in their breakneck schedules: Many of the actors present are still doing eight shows a week, on top of balancing various press commitments ahead of Tonys weekend. (Just take LaTanya Richardson Jackson, a star of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama Purpose, who went from the Fourth Annual Black Women on Broadway Awards on Monday afternoon to the unveiling of Denzel Washington’s portrait at Sardi’s—and still made it downtown in time for cocktails.) Left to their own devices, I wondered, how did others like to spend their leisure time?
The Last Five Years’ Nick Jonas, for one, had just enjoyed an idyllic-sounding day off: “I walked along the High Line with my family,” he shared. “We just went from 30th Street down to Meatpacking and had a nice brunch.” Taking things in a different direction, the ever-charismatic Jonathan Groff, of Just in Time, hied to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium in leather chaps a week ago for the Cowboy Carter tour (“I just did The Tonight Show and showed the pictures of me in the outfit,” he told me gleefully). Tom Francis, the handsome leading man in Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Blvd., is something of a soda savant on TikTok these days; Darren Criss, of Maybe Happy Ending, has developed a “fixation” on vintage Bob Mackie shirts (the embroidered button-up that he picked out for Monday’s party was one example) and texting with his fellow nominees; and while Jennifer Simard, a riot in Death Becomes Her, likes to snuggle up with a British crime series—“a tea and a murder,” as she put it—Natalie Venetia Belcon recovers from the joyful noise of Buena Vista Social Club in perfect silence: “It’s actually an excellent sound when you’re busy.”