‘Making sure everyone can see the plays': can Hugh Jackman make theater less elitist?
One night last month in the West Village, I had the pleasure of being nervous for Hugh Jackman. On stage at the Minetta Lane Theatre, the 56-year-old movie star and Broadway veteran appeared startlingly undefended and vulnerable. In character as a middle-aged university professor infatuated with his 19-year-old pupil, Jackman addressed the audience for a play called Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes with the lights up, as if helming a lecture full of shy students put on the spot; when one viewer sneezed during Jackman's monologue, he paused to say bless you.
I fretted a few rows from Wolverine, more aware of my fellow audience members' faces and cellphones than I've ever been at a New York show and acutely attuned to the fact that this all could go awry at any moment. Theater is always a contract between audience and performer, but years attending big Broadway shows have inured me to its fragility. At the Minetta, with just the commanding presence of Jackman and the lit audience at his feet, that contract felt thrillingly, temporarily exposed.
That electric current was the point of Together, a new initiative prioritizing intimate, affordable theater founded by Jackman, director Ian Rickson and producer Sonia Friedman, which has occupied the Minetta for the better part of the spring. 'The starting point for this company was to not have a filter between [actors] and the audience, and for there to be a real connection, an intimate connection,' said Friedman, recently deemed the 'most prolific and powerful theater producer working today' by the New York Times for launching such Broadway and West End juggernauts as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Stranger Things and Funny Girl. 'It's a partnership spiritually, creatively, artistically, and we're all there to support one another.'
The company, launched in conjunction with the Amazon subsidiary Audible, seeks to provide an alternative to Broadway's ballooning ticket prices and large, technically intricate productions. Together's first two shows – Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a #MeToo-themed play from Canadian writer Hannah Moscovitch, and a reworking of August Strindberg's 1888 play Creditors – are heady, relatively low-tech and actor-forward, with two and three performers, respectively. (Notably, all performers have big screen credits – Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justice Smith starred in Creditors.) And at a time when the average Broadway ticket goes for over $120 – or as much as $921 this spring, for a starry production of Othello – a quarter of Together tickets are comped and distributed through the Theater Defense Fund to seniors, students, veterans, teachers and other community groups. Another quarter are sold the day of performance, via digital lottery or in-person box office, for $35.
'We're trying to make theater less elitist,' said Rickson, a veteran Broadway and West End director who is based in London. 'I have felt existential about curating work for an increasingly elitist audience, but I hate saying that because they're people too. What you want is a range of people to experience the work.'
The company's ticket model 'in and of itself is allowing for a different demographic', said Jackman via email. 'You can absolutely feel it. The audience is wildly different for every show.'
In production and in ethos, Together emphasizes a return to basics: an actor, a director, a stage and community. The trio, who worked together on the Broadway 2014 show The River, first conceived of the idea on, fittingly, a river walk in London in 2020. It was the height of the pandemic, and the group longed not just for the return of theater, but the return of a certain freedom from their early careers, when the pressure was off, the stakes were low and the enthusiasm was high. 'There's huge expectations when Hugh's in a play, there's huge expectations when I'm producing a play,' said Friedman. 'And we just thought, how can we approach this work as if we were doing this at the beginning? Can you have that fearlessness? Why can't we go back to basics?'
'Together was created with the idea of community – removing barriers so that everyone is able to participate in theater,' said Jackman. 'Making sure that everyone can see the plays no matter who they are. Also, encouraging experiences of theater that are electric, elemental and relatively simple in terms of bells and whistles. Material that goes right to the heart.'
Rickson returned to the history of radical, public-art theater in New York, from the Yiddish theater district of the early 20th century, to the pioneering Group Theatre collective of the 1930s, to the New York outfit of the New Deal's Federal Theatre Project, to the Actors Studio. 'There's a radical ancestry here,' he said, that inspired the new company's rules: equal pay for actors, no star billing, an element of public access and no designated press nights.
The group tinkered with Together over several years, meeting every few months in New York or London to discuss ideas. Meanwhile, the financial landscape for live theater in New York only grew more challenging. Costs shot up anywhere from 20-30% after the pandemic, and never came back down. On Broadway, 'something that was going to cost $4m pre-pandemic is now $7m', said Friedman. 'If it costs so much to put on a piece of work, and it costs so much to run that piece of work, you have to charge a particular ticket price.'
Together self-consciously stops short of proposing to fix Broadway's price creep – 'I don't have the answers,' said Friedman. 'If what we are doing helps create a conversation about how the system might change, fantastic. But that is not our driving force.' But it does provide an alternative to that system, from power players within that system who espouse, as Friedman put it, 'huge respect for the industry I work in, but also with a huge sense of concern and caution about the way we're going'.
It's worked financially, at least so far, because, unlike Broadway, Together is a non-commercial business. Audible, the audiobook subsidiary of Amazon, funded its first season. The corporation recorded the works for distribution on its platform, and Together got access to the Minetta, which has been in partnership with Audible for live theater since 2018. The shows are deliberately low-tech, the sets minimalist – a few pieces of furniture, drinks and, in the case of Sexual Misconduct, one (non-functioning) lawnmower – keeping costs low. The first technical rehearsal, a process of moving from the rehearsal room to the theater that can take weeks on Broadway, took a single day. The changeover between plays takes just 15 minutes.
Though the company has attracted big names so far, Together retains a sense of a scrappy, experimental theater group with no set path. All three founders described the company as a sort of professional pressure release valve, an ideas generator rather than an endpoint. 'I love the idea of it being ephemeral – it could happen in London, it could happen in Sydney, it could happen in anywhere,' said Rickson. Creditors wraps in June, but the trio is already in brainstorming mode, positing potential future iterations of Together that could include a mentoring program, a different home base, a continuation of its inaugural panel series, or allowing big-name screen actors the chance to test out theater without the pressure of an eight-days-a-week Broadway commitment.
'When we announced it and launched it, I think we were quite timid in terms of what we're trying to achieve, because we don't want to come across as having found the answers to Broadway or finding the answers to how you do work,' said Friedman. 'But we're ambitious about the future and we're talking about it constantly.'
'I think the only thing we absolutely know is we're going to make a commitment for as long as we feel we can,' she added. 'Is that years? Is it the rest of our lives? Who knows? But we're in. We're in for the long haul with Together.'
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