March 22 has long been an auspicious date within the transatlantic theater community, marking the birthday of both Stephen Sondheim and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. But on Sunday, when a dizzying constellation of actors, writers, producers, directors, and generous patrons of the performing arts on both sides of the pond gathered at the Greenwich Village home of Anna Wintour, it was in celebration of yet another towering, agenda-setting force within that world: the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.
Together with the actor John Lithgow and director Nicholas Hytner, Wintour hosted a jovial fundraising cocktail for the Royal Court, which is now in its 70th season—its third under the leadership of artistic director David Byrne, himself an accomplished director and playwright.
Not long after 6 p.m., the parlor floor of Wintour’s Greenwich Village townhouse was teeming with guests (and delicious passed canapés), among them, Louisa Jacobson, Ivy Getty, Huma Abedin, Charles Porch, Robert Denning, Indré Rockefeller, Sophia Herring, Paul Henkel, JK Brown, Eric Diefenbach, Robert Soros, Jamie Singer Soros, Doron Weber, Alexander Hankin, and Pam Hurst Della Pietra. Also in the crowd were members of the cast and creative team behind Giant—Mark Rosenblatt’s thrillingly provocative, Olivier Award-winning play about the children’s author Roald Dahl and his trenchant antisemitism—starring Lithgow, Aya Cash, Elliot Levey, and Rachael Stirling. After debuting at the Royal Court Theatre in the fall of 2024 and transferring to the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre about a year ago, it was set to open on Broadway, at the Music Box Theatre, the very next night.
Speaking to theater producer Fiona Rudin, Lithgow—standing side by side with his wife, the historian Mary Yeager—likened the shifts in Giant’s cast over its three stagings to “a kaleidoscope—you change one stone and everything changes.” (Cash joined the production at the Harold Pinter; Stella Everett and David Manis have come onboard in New York.) Rudin, in turn, noted that she’d never seen director Nicholas Hytner—who last helmed a Broadway show in 2012, when One Man, Two Guvnors also played at the Music Box—quite so relaxed.
Others were feeling a little more nervy. “I’m very pleased to be here because it stops me sitting at home, fretting,” Levey told me, laughing. Rosenblatt was just as admirably frank. “I am feeling very tense, generally,” he said. “It’s a strange thing because we’ve done it twice already, but each time you have to kind of prove yourself.” His wife, journalist Amy Abrahams, on the other hand, seemed markedly less worried. “All you get from transferring is that everyone is just deeper in it,” she observed. “Every performance is just wiser—and it was wise anyway.”
When, after some 30 minutes of mingling, the party moved downstairs, Wintour stood before her assembled guests to deliver some welcoming remarks. “To scan the list of plays that have had their debut at the Royal Court Theatre is to marvel at the range of British theater, from Rocky Horror to Top Girls, from Not I to The Ferryman,” she said. “But as David Hare recently reminded me, it was Arthur Miller who said that until the Royal Court Theatre and Look Back in Anger, which premiered there in 1956, the British theater was ‘hermetically sealed from life.’ Perhaps that was because Mr. Miller was just fed up with the London papers calling him Mr. Monroe.”