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?