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.”
