Latest news with #SoniaFriedman
The Guardian
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘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.'
Forbes
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Hugh Jackman And Sonia Friedman Boldly Bid To Democratize Theater
In rehearsal for the Audible x TOGETHER productions of Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes and ... More Creditors. Both shows are now at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre Since its earliest beginnings, dating back to the ancient Greeks, theater has connected people in profound ways. Theater, as Oscar Wilde once said, is 'the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.' And it's even better when accessible to all. Especially in a city where the average cost of an off-Broadway show can be $75 or more and the average Broadway ticket can run upwards of $135. And tickets for many shows can cost much more than that. To that end, this past spring Hugh Jackman and Sonia Friedman debuted TOGETHER, a theater company they co-founded. TOGETHER's mission is to create more accessible live theater in an intimate setting. That means low-cost ticket offerings catering to broader audiences and more streamlined productions without expensive sets and big salaries. Devoted to establishing more affordable theater TOGETHER joined forces with Audible, which has a 400-seat Minetta Lane Theater. Through June 18 they are presenting two shows in repertory in this intimate locale. While more pared-down in terms of sets, costumes and lighting design, the plays don't skimp on the richness of the performances. There's Hannah Moscovitch's Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, with Ella Beatty and Hugh Jackman, which delves into the #MeToo-damaging exercise of power between teacher and student. Then there is Jen Silverman's new adaptation of August Strindberg's Creditors, with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff, and Justice Smith. The play, a psychological thriller, presents a kind of complex love triangle. Both Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes and Creditors are directed by Ian Rickson. A rehearsal for Audible x TOGETHER Tickets to the plays are accessible in a variety of ways:. 25 percent of all tickets cost $35 and are available for purchase on the day of each performance through a digital lottery and in-person at the box office. An additional 25 percent of tickets are given for free to a range of community organizations across the tristate area. The organizations range from seniors and veterans groups to students, educators, local neighborhoods, and more. All remaining tickets go on sale. Plus, the plays are recorded for Audible and will be released on Audible at a later date. Visit for more details. Maggie Siff and Liev Schreiber in a scene from Creditors Audible's team continues to be fiercely committed to theater audiences. 'Audible Theater is proud to be a home for creators to imagine outside the bounds of traditional models, and we're honored to collaborate with the team at TOGETHER who are doing just that,' said Jeremy Blocker, Audible's head of Live Creative Producing 'We're both devoted to connecting talented artists with audiences in intimate spaces like the Minetta. With TDF, we're excited to ensure that every audience at the theater reflects the brilliant diversity of our community. By later releasing these plays as Audible Originals, our service has the ability to share these powerful works with people across the globe.' In Creditors Tekla is an author who has written a steamy novel and included unsavory details about her first marriage. Gustav befriends Tekla's second husband, Adi, while they are holed up at an old seaside resort. Gustav tries to convince Adi that Tekla is capable of manipulation and plants doubt about Tekla's loyalty and love. Meanwhile Adi begins to question his marriage and spirals while we discover that Gustav's motives may be more sinister than what we imagined. Curiously, when asked what she feels Creditors is all about, Siff says that the play hinges on tenderness. 'It might seem a strange answer, but I think the word that came up the most in rehearsal, was tenderness,' says the actor who starred on Billions, Sons of Anarchy, and Mad Men. 'There's the tenderness of each of these characters. In an almost prismatic way the audience is let into each of the characters' perspectives and vulnerabilities and their capacities for tenderness. As Siff points out, that caring emotion allows the audience to feel a sense of compassion for all three characters. 'Even as we battle it out, tenderness seems to be the bridge toward understanding, toward compassion, toward healing, toward togetherness,' adds Siff. "It is the thing that creates new shapes as we evolve in our gender roles.' Jeryl Brunner: Tekla is such a nuanced character and you bring so many layers to her. What gives Tekla strength when both her husband and Gustav are trying to take her down? Maggie Siff: The Tekla in our adaptation, and as I understand her, is someone who feels 'modern' in her moment. She is not afraid to push against convention but is also is very tender and full of a belief in love. In some ways she's a romantic idealist. It's just that her ideals aren't necessarily everyone else's. I always love the line she says to her husband Adi: 'We're not trapped like everyone else. We're trying to make a thing that works for us.' She believes in love, longs for love, but requires psychological and artistic freedom. And she's trying to craft that vessel. Brunner: What is the joy of doing Creditors? Siff: Working with great actors on a script that's brilliant with a great director. It doesn't actually get better than that. Brunner: What is cool about Audible x TOGETHER? And why is accessibility so key for people who long to see theater but cannot afford it? Siff: Audible x TOGETHER is brilliant. Creditors is so accessible to so many different kinds of audiences: young and old, seasoned theater goers and newbies to the theater. When you have great stories that bridge divides, they need audiences from all walks so that the play can live its fullest expression, and have its widest reach. The dedication this company has to bringing new theater audiences at affordable prices is the key to ensuring theater as an art form lasts. And we need theater more than ever—a place to see people in real time, a place to put down our devices and share atmosphere and story with a roomful of other people. Justice Smith and Liev Schreiber Maggie Siff —
New York Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Tom Felton to Reprise Draco Malfoy Role in ‘Harry Potter' on Broadway
Tom Felton, who rose to fame as Draco Malfoy in the 'Harry Potter' film franchise, is reprising his role as the boy wizard's blond archnemesis in the Broadway production of the show, for a limited engagement beginning in November. He will be making his Broadway debut with his turn in 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' — his first return to the character in 15 years — and will be in the show through March, according to a news release. Felton said in a statement on Wednesday that being part of the Harry Potter films had been one of the greatest honors of his life. 'Joining this production will be a full-circle moment for me, because when I begin performances in 'Cursed Child' this fall, I'll also be the exact age Draco is in the play,' he said. 'It's surreal to be stepping back into his shoes — and of course his iconic platinum blond hair — and I am thrilled to be able to see his story through and to share it with the greatest fan community in the world.' The Broadway show takes place 19 years after the original series ended. Draco is now a father, and all grown up with Harry, Ron and Hermione, send their children to Hogwarts. Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, producers for the show, said in a joint statement that Draco left an indelible impression on Harry Potter fans around world and that Felton's return to the franchise will offer Potterheads a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see him again. 'This moment is powerful on many levels,' they said, adding that the moment was charged with nostalgia, evolution and emotion. 'Tom's return to Hogwarts bridges generations of fans and breathes new life into a beloved story.' Since appearing in the 'Harry Potter' films, Felton has acted in the 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' and 'A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting' movies. He also made his West End debut in 2022, as the star of '2:22 A Ghost Story.'
The Independent
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Harry Potter film actor confirms role in Broadway play
Tom Felton, known for his role as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, will join the Broadway cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for a limited engagement, marking his Broadway debut. Felton will begin performances at the Lyric Theatre in New York City on November 11 and continue through March 22, 2026, becoming the first actor from the film franchise to reprise their screen role on Broadway. In a statement, Felton expressed his excitement about returning to the role of Draco, noting the full-circle moment of playing the character at the same age Draco is in the play. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child picks up 19 years after the original series, following the lives of Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Draco as they navigate parenthood and send their children to Hogwarts. Producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender highlighted the significance of Felton's casting, noting it as a powerful moment for both the actor and the character of Draco, as he faces the challenges of parenthood on stage.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct'
We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,' lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you've heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns. But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman's venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty's labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson's long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman's manhandling of an actual lawn mower. Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a 'world class college.' He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, 'racking up ex-wives like a maniac.' Currently he is separated from his third. Soon another cliché enters: the 'grossly underwritten' sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to 'expose their mediocrity.' That's Beatty's Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins. 'The erotics of pedagogy,' Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains. It is here you may say to yourself: I've seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays ('Oleanna') and novels ('Disgrace') — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man's point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie's lines are more like this: 'I shouldn't / I don't know why I / Said that / Sorry I'm mm.' Beatty, recently seen in Ibsen's 'Ghosts,' is all but ghostly here; she delivers Annie's halting vagueness so precisely that she at first seems merely underpowered as an actor. In fact, she's fulfilling the play's plan perfectly: Even if overwhelmed by Macklem's force majeure, she cannot seem like a victim. All but demanding his sexual attention, she tells Macklem that his books, in their crudity, taught her 'what I like.' She devours him hungrily, comparing him favorably to boys she has slept with. She shows him her own fiction, and laps up his besotted praise. She understands from the start, she says later, exactly what the 'exchange' was. So you're left to wonder: Who's grooming whom? And for what? With Macklem especially, the play wants to keep the issue of culpability unsettled as long as possible. That's a tough job, given the way time has trained us to presume absolute guilt in such situations; the affair takes place in 2014, a few years before #MeToo acquired its hashtag. Nor does Macklem's temper, which flares when Annie behaves in ways he considers irrational, give us confidence in his ability to transcend his ego. In those moments he seems merely bullheaded and cutting, a lot like that lawn mower. Who but Jackman could keep us guessing despite that? His onstage seductiveness has always been frank yet cheerful, its sharkiness couched in charm. When he played Peter Allen in 'The Boy From Oz,' women (and men) in the audience begged for his sweaty T-shirt at the end of the show. (In exchange for a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, he obliged them.) To take advantage of that appeal, Rickson has Jackman deliver a lot of his lines directly to the audience, at one point while seated at the lip of the stage with his legs dangling down as if he were Judy Garland. But Jackman goes well beyond the brief. On the night I attended, when a woman in Row B started coughing loudly, it was clear that the man who'd played the exuberant, audience-coddling Allen — Garland's son-in-law — was not about to leave her uncared-for. Ad libbing, he offered her a bottle of water — and was clearly ready to deliver it in person. She said no, but I was surprised that the 400 other theatergoers didn't start hacking immediately. He had them just where Macklem wanted Annie, and possibly vice versa. For an audience no less than an individual, the steep slope of powerful attraction is difficult to negotiate. Neither Macklem nor Annie (she's given no last name) is sure-footed. He's an overinflated balloon, blowing himself through life. She's, well, 19. Beyond any other consideration — attraction, power, psychology, class — her absolute age, not the gap in their ages, is what Moscovitch wants us to consider. Annie is not yet a fully grown human; she barely has the emotional wherewithal to handle her impulses, to know which ones she can safely indulge. Lest I spoil the ingenious working out of the story, I won't say more except that we meet Annie again when she does have that wherewithal. That both she and Macklem have aged we see at once by the simplest of means: posture, diction, a change of clothes for her, a change of glasses for him. (The costumes are by Ásta Bennie Hostetter.) Whether either character has grown is a different question, one you'll have to decide for yourself. Is revenge growth? Is growth itself revenge? That's the thrill of Rickson's production: It doesn't tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider. Better yet, it achieves that payoff with minimal fuss. The set (by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones) needs only a few chairs, a desk and a lamp to place you anywhere you need to be. Mikaal Sulaiman's sound consists mostly of faint music, the kind you sometimes think you hear while falling into a dream. There are no microphones; the actors' actual voices are hitting your actual ears. If this is theater on a shoestring, let the theater never have shoes. And though I'll wait to proclaim the Audible x Together experiment a sustainable success — at least until its next production, 'Creditors,' with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justice Smith, opens later this month — 'Sexual Misconduct' is proof of concept even as a one-off. Those cheap tickets buy you not only a seat at the Minetta Lane but also a place in the living conversation of raw yet thoughtful theater. Plus maybe, if you cough enough, a bottle of water.
