Dior and A24’s new two-year partnership brings the French house to Cherry Lane Theatre, the West Village stage Edna St. Vincent Millay helped found in 1924.
The brick building at 38 Commerce Street in the West Village has been, over the course of its long life, a brewery, a tobacco warehouse, and a box factory. It was built in 1836 to make beer for a man named Alexander McLachlan, and it spent the better part of a century doing plain, useful work until 1924, when the Provincetown Players, a troupe that counted the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay among its members, founded the Cherry Lane Theatre inside it. The group hired the scenic designer Cleon Throckmorton to fit a 200-seat auditorium and a small stage within the old walls. “Might as well act in a telephone booth!” the entertainer George M. Cohan remarked of the result, according to Village Preservation.
On Sept. 10, Dior and A24 announced a two-year partnership across film, theater, and live events that makes Dior the premier partner of Cherry Lane. A24 bought it in 2023 for just over $10 million and reopened it last September. The partnership launched with “Both Ends,” a one-night performance by Justin Vivian Bond, produced and directed by Zack Winokur and inspired by Millay, whose 1918 quatrain “First Fig” begins “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night.” Jonathan Anderson designed the costumes, and Bond wears an archival piece by Paul Poiret, whose work also informed Anderson’s Winter 2026 collection for Dior.
Winokur directed Bond in 2021 in “Only an Octave Apart,” a duet with the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, and Anderson dressed both performers, building most of the looks from scratch and altering others from JW Anderson and Loewe samples.
“This is the start of an exciting partnership built around artists and storytelling,” Anderson, creative director of Dior’s women’s, men’s, and haute couture collections, said in a statement. “Putting two creatively driven worlds side by side — you start to see what they pull out of each other that neither could’ve found alone. That’s where the interesting stuff happens.”
Dior announced the deal with a short film by Aidan Zamiri, who directed A24’s Charli XCX feature “The Moment.” In the two-minute film, Sabrina Carpenter, Josh O’Connor, Drew Starkey, Camille Cottin, and Sophie Wilde each try to play Anderson, attempting his hunched post-show bow and his Northern Irish accent with mixed success, and Anderson makes a cameo as himself. “He tightens his jaw a lot, so I imagine that must make it harder,” Carpenter says in the film. Starkey already knows his subject, having starred in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” which A24 released with costumes and a merch line by Anderson.
Cherry Lane Theatre, New York’s oldest off-Broadway stage
For a room Cohan compared to a phone booth, Cherry Lane has hosted a long roster of major playwrights. The theater premiered work by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka, and Sam Shepard, and Stephen Schwartz’s “Godspell” opened there in 1971. Lorraine Hansberry’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” premiered on Commerce Street in 1969, and Shepard’s “True West” played there in 1982. Barbra Streisand, at 14, took a job moving sets and painting scenery and worked her way up to understudy and assistant stage manager for Sean O’Casey’s “Purple Dust.”
The actor Angelina Fiordellisi bought the building in 1996 for $1.7 million and put $3 million into renovations, later opening a 60-seat black box studio next door. She sold it to A24 in March 2023.
What Dior and A24 have planned for Cherry Lane Theatre
A24’s renovation added new seating, a film projector and screen, and a concessions kiosk, while the stage itself and its historic details stayed intact. Wild Cherry, a restaurant and bar from the team behind Frenchette, now operates at the venue, and the calendar moves between multiweek theater runs and one-night film screenings, comedy sets, and concerts.
“We don’t really have a mandate or guardrails for programming, quality is the only unifier, and we just want to give talent and amazing voices an opportunity to share their stories,” Dani Rait, a former “Saturday Night Live” booker hired to program the theater, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Beyond opening night, Dior and A24 plan a curated slate of programming “on and off screen, designed to connect artists with audiences,” along with support for students learning the creative and practical sides of film and theater.
“It’s amazing how everyone has a Cherry Lane story,” Fiordellisi told Chelsea News. “Many people tell me they had their first date, or something important, happen to them there.”
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