Early on Monday night, a day after the Drama Desk Awards and 6 days previous to the 78th Tonys, a parade of actors, writers, and administrators—sensible 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 12 months’s celebration adopted the normal format: cocktail hour on the parlor flooring; a comfortable seated dinner; remarks from the hostesses, heralding their “favourite occasion of the 12 months”; after which a dessert course of sorbet and jaunty production-themed muffins, designed by Charlotte Neuville in collaboration with Alisa Forbes and Daniel Colonel. However with 2025 marking this social gathering’s tenth (!) anniversary, photographer Hunter Abrams leaned into the sense of event, reworking the home’s shaded again backyard right into a full-fledged portrait studio.
Nicely, it received’t shock you to be taught that it is a group that is aware of precisely the right way to hit their mark; the gathering’s earliest arrivals, Adrienne Warren (a sensational Cathy within the debut Broadway manufacturing of Jason Robert Brown’s The Final 5 Years), Helen J Shen (a revelation in Possibly Comfortable Ending, the hit musical of the season), and Taylor Trensch (a spotlight of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s attractive revival of Floyd Collins at Lincoln Heart Theater), made that clear straight away. Following simply 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 within the night time earlier than, when she and Audra McDonald tied for a Drama Desk…no huge deal. “Once they introduced my identify, I used to be like, ‘Oh, my God’—and I went to run to her,” Rogers recalled, beaming. “She is so unbelievable.” (It’s not for nothing that certainly one of her all-time favourite Tony performances includes a pregnant McDonald—and a not pregnant, however no much less luminous Warren—tap-dancing with abandon throughout a quantity from Shuffle Alongside.)
Because the clock struck 7:00 p.m., arrivals picked up at pace. Cole Escola—who, within the span of some 15 months, went from making their off-Broadway debut on the Lucille Lortel to turning into a a number of Tony nominee with the raucously ribald Oh, Mary!—caroused with their Thom Browne-clad director, Sam Pinkleton. A rosy-cheeked Danny Burstein—the extraordinarily endearing Herbie in George C. Wolfe’s celebrated revival of Gypsy—greeted his Louise, Pleasure Woods (a imaginative and prescient in draped, ruched, and feathered Lapointe). Elsewhere, the John Proctor Is the Villain contingent—Sadie Sink, Fina Strazza, and Gabriel Ebert, together with playwright Kimberly Belflower and director Danya Taymor—closed ranks and giggled; English scribe Sanaz Toossi shared a quiet second with star Tala Ashe; and Simply in Time’s Gracie Lawrence, carrying a Dries Van Noten jacket, Comme des Garçons shirt, ballooning Coperni skirt, and Alaïa heels, instructed me how excited—not nervous!—she was for Sunday’s Tonys ceremony, with Cynthia Erivo because the host: “I’m such a Cynthia fan, I might have snuck in anyway.”
