Anna Wintour and Bee Carrozzini Toast the Best of the Theater Season With an Intimate Dinner
Two days after the biggest stars of the 2022-23 theater season descended on the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan for the Drama League Awards—where Some Like It Hot and Leopoldstadt were among the shows honored for outstanding achievement—more of the same headed to Greenwich Village, where Anna Wintour hosted a relaxed Sunday dinner with Bee Carrozzini. Resuming a cherished tradition put on pause by the pandemic, the evening fêted the actors, directors, playwrights, composers, and lyricists behind the most celebrated productions of the last year, both on and Off Broadway.
In the garden of Wintour’s home, where guests posed for pictures before ascending to the parlor floor for cocktails, the mood was fizzy and bright. “Sorry, we’re futzing,” trilled a glamorous Audra McDonald, who led last fall’s Ohio State Murders, as she paused to smooth her skirt next to her husband, Will Swenson (A Beautiful Noise). (Needless to say, photographer Hunter Abrams gave the six-time Tony winner all the time she needed.) Nearby, Kimberly Akimbo’s Bonnie Milligan greeted Ain’t No Mo playwright Jordan E. Cooper; A Doll’s House’s Arian Moayed cracked up with Fat Ham director Saheem Ali; and Juliet’s Lorna Courtney reflected on the beautiful madness of her first leading Broadway role: “I am tired, but the show is so much fun, you sort of forget about it and you’re just caught up in the moment.”
“As I was coming out the door, and the low-hanging sun hit me in the face, I realized I was in a magical place,” declared Some Like It Hot’s Christian Borle, a two-time Tony winner, and he was right: Everywhere you turned on Sunday, some enchanting reunion of old colleagues and collaborators seemed to be taking place. Phillipa Soo, resplendent in a fitted floral cocktail dress, was flying the flag for two glorious musical revivals: Into the Woods, in which she played the Cinderella to Sara Bareilles’s Baker’s Wife last year, and Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, with Andrew Burnap and Jordan Donica. (As it happens, Donica also did Into the Woods with Bareilles last year, but at the New York City Center before its transfer to Broadway, when Soo joined the cast. Do you follow?) Elsewhere, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II—a first-time Tony nominee after making his Broadway debut in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, directed by Kenny Leon—embraced his co-star and fellow nominee Corey Hawkins, just in from Atlanta, where he’s shooting a film adaptation of The Piano Lesson…the August Wilson play that LaTanya Richardson Jackson directed her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, in this season. And did you remember that years before he played Willy Loman in Death of Salesman, Wendell Pierce starred in the world-premiere production of Cost of Living—the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Martyna Majok, who was also in attendance last night—at the Williamstown Theater Festival?
The theater community being as small as it is, these examples go on and on. Amber Ruffin, in striking bright pink, co-wrote Some Like It Hot with Matthew López, whose epic play The Inheritance won Burnap a Tony. Before Michael Arden revived Parade, he directed Shucked breakout Alex Newell in Once on This Island in 2017; and before Bartlett Sher revived Camelot, he directed Kimberly Akimbo star Victoria Clark’s Tony-winning performance in The Light in the Piazza back in 2005.
And then there were the looser connections. Sweeney Todd’s Annaleigh Ashford chatted with Abdul-Mateen II about working with the same dressers backstage. Pierce and playwright James Ijames (Fat Ham) sang the praises of Billy Eugene Jones, who appeared with the former in a production of Waiting for Godot. When Josh Groban huddled with Maria Friedman—whose brilliant production of Merrily We Roll Along opens on Broadway this September—did they talk about the concert production of Sweeney Todd that Friedman did in 2007, or Stephen Sondheim more generally? Jordan Roth caught up with Jordan Donica, and at 19 and 20, respectively, Kimberly Akimbo’s Justin Cooley and Gaten Matarazzo, of Sweeney Todd and Netflix’s Stranger Things, seemed to get along famously. (“This is a room of people that make me starstruck, which I don’t usually get,” Matarazzo tells me later.) And while Juliet’s Betsy Wolfe admired playwright Amy Herzog’s (A Doll’s House) spangled black dress, Wolfe and Borle’s former Falsettos co-star Brandon Uranowitz (Leopoldstadt)—wearing a beaded purse and layered Star of David pendants from Susan Alexandra (“I mean, I’m in a very Jewish show, so I needed some Judaica”)—talked accessories with Some Like It Hot’s J. Harrison Ghee, another Tony nominee, in the smiley-face Giuseppe Zanotti slip-ons that they almost didn’t buy from Saks Off Fifth years ago.
Dinner—served downstairs at 7:30pm sharp—was hearty and seasonal: Gioja Farms burrata with Cavillion melon, aged balsamic, and market greens, followed by Joyce Farms chicken breast with spring vegetables, fingerling potatoes, and Meyer lemon. But before dessert was passed around—sorbet, berries, and theater-themed cakes by Charlotte Neuville, if you were wondering—Wintour and Carrozzini took a moment to address their guests.