The Creditors team would head down to Minetta Lane later that evening to see Jackman and Beatty run through their piece—exactly the kind of cross-pollination among actors that Together’s founders imagined on a fateful stroll in London’s Hyde Park in December 2020.

“We all talked about what we wanted from our lives,” Friedman recalls of their meet-up at the peak of the pandemic. “That period provoked these very big questions about…what are we doing? We wanted to get back to something that we were all missing. And what we were missing was how we started.” They then agreed to form a new company shared equally between Jackman and Friedman, with Rickson directing.

“My name’s not above the title, and I bloody love that,” Friedman says with a laugh. “It’s so liberating.”

This back-to-basics approach may be unexpected coming from Friedman, whose theatrical juggernauts include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway and the recently opened Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Her shows have won a total of 48 Tony Awards, most recently for 2024’s revival of Merrily We Roll Along, directed by her sister, Maria. But perhaps there is no one better suited to pose a counterpoint to Broadway’s bloat than someone who has been minding its bottom line for as long, and as winningly, as she has. “On Broadway, plays cost $8 million and musicals cost $25 to $30 million, so ticket prices are hiked up,” Friedman explains. “We felt New York was the right place to kick this off.”

Back at Minetta Lane, discussion has turned to choosing the red coat that Beatty’s character, Annie, enters in. They ultimately decide on a bright crimson overcoat they’ve been using from rehearsal, shocking and direct. Between scenes, Beatty, who is fresh off Lincoln Center Theater’s Ghosts and FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans last year, runs lines with Jackman, their legs dangling from the stage.

“We’ve really had to grind,” says Beatty, who graduated from Juilliard in 2022. “Hugh and I would show up an hour early to rehearsal to run lines, just so that by the time we were playing, we could be really free.”

Photo: Guy Aroch

She has also been brushing up on lines with her mother, actor Annette Bening. (Her father is actor Warren Beatty.) “Getting to watch her reaction reading the play for the first time was really fun. She was laughing so much. And she knows good material.”