J.Lo! Spike Lee! Angela Bassett! The Bidens! The Opening Night of Othello Was as Starry as You’d Expect

On Sunday night, stars of stage, screen, and just about everything in between descended on New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre to fête perhaps the opening of the 2024-2025 Broadway season: Kenny Leon’s new staging of Othello, starring Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, Molly Osborne, and Andrew Burnap.

After a few years away from the New York stage for both Washington (who last appeared on Broadway in George C. Wolfe’s heralded 2018 revival of The Iceman Cometh) and Gyllenhaal (who memorably did Nick Payne’s A Life at the Hudson in 2019), both men had little trouble drawing a dense crowd of friends and supporters.

Among them? Former President and first lady Joe and Jill Biden (the latter, in what appeared to be the shimmery blue Ralph Lauren dress that she wore during the Democratic National Convention last summer); Jennifer Lopez and her daughter, Emme; Colman Domingo, in a dapper cream suit; Spike Lee (who recently wrapped Highest 2 Lowest, his adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, with Washington); Angela Bassett; Liev Schreiber; Samuel L. Jackson; Katie Holmes (who starred last fall in Kenny Leon’s other big revival this season, of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town); Jeremy O. Harris; and And Just Like That co-stars Cynthia Nixon and Nicole Ari Parker. The show at the Barrymore was followed by an after-party at Tavern on the Green.

See some of the best pictures from the evening below—and revisit Maya Singer’s preview of Othello, with photographs by Annie Leibovitz, here.