Original article by Michael Paulson.
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Sonia Friedman may just be the most prolific and powerful theater producer working today.
Over the past 30 years, she has become a peerless figure in the West End, where last year she had a record-setting seven shows running simultaneously, and on Broadway, where she has produced five of the past six Tony Award winners for best play. She has been entrusted both with prestige work by celebrated writers like Tom Stoppard and Stephen Sondheim and with stage adaptations of hugely valuable intellectual property like “Harry Potter,” “Stranger Things” and “Paddington.”
But she’s endlessly restless. Taking for granted neither the sustainability of the business nor the security of her own place in it, she has become ever more worried about the industry’s future.
A lifelong Londoner, Friedman spends about one-third of each year in New York, but she hasn’t bought an apartment, and only in January started renting, after decades of hotel stays.
“I live, literally, with a suitcase in the hall,” she said during one of several interviews. “It could all end tomorrow here. It could all end tomorrow there. And it might. It really might. That’s always how I work. The drive is: It could all end tomorrow. It’s not necessarily a nice way to live, is it?”
For years she has expressed concern about the high costs of producing on Broadway, particularly when compared to the West End, but her concern has intensified since the pandemic, as rising costs for labor, materials and services have driven show budgets — and ticket prices for hot shows — ever higher. She said, for example, that “The Hills of California,” a family drama by Jez Butterworth that she produced last year in both cities, faced production costs that were 350 percent higher in New York than in London.
Increasingly, Friedman has been using her stature to try to make change. In Britain, she has been outspoken about the importance of continued government support for the arts, with a special concern about arts in schools programs. On Broadway, she is a persistent voice calling out the industry, warning about the impact of high costs on both audiences and investors.
“The fact that plays are now hard to produce for less than $6 million or $7 million is of course of great concern, let alone musicals,” she said, “and don’t even ask me how much ‘Stranger Things’ is going to cost.”
Just this week, she announced a new venture, seeking both to rediscover the creative joy she felt as a scrappy young theater maker and to attempt a radical experiment in ticket affordability. She has partnered with Hugh Jackman to form a company, Together, that plans to stage small-scale, bare-bones play productions in small venues in the United States and Britain, and they are pledging that tickets will be “genuinely affordable.”
“I’m putting my money where my mouth is, which is about accessibility, and finding different models, particularly in New York, for doing work,” she said. “It isn’t that we found the solution to Broadway. No way. That work is so hard, and getting harder, but I don’t want to stop doing it.”
THE WORD PRODUCER is pretty nebulous these days: It can mean an old-school impresario who puts together, oversees and markets a show; a person with money who helps bankroll a show; or a person with fame who helps champion a show. Friedman is distinguished by her involvement in the storytelling.
“I try to be the audience, and question some of the decisions,” she said. “I’m not the writer. I’m never going to say, ‘This is what it should be.’ I’m going to say, ‘What do you think it should be, because I’m not necessarily seeing it all on the page, or feeling it all.’”
Trying to provoke, rather than prescribe, is her approach. “I don’t want the writer to write what I want — I want the writer to write something that I didn’t know I needed. And that’s been the rule for me throughout my working life, to do with the thing that’s almost impossible to articulate, which is about a feeling, about a chill, about a goosebump, holding your breath and realizing that time has stopped and I’m lost in another world, and if that happens, I’m all in.”
Jonathan Groff recalled the first time he met Friedman. She wanted him to star in last season’s “Merrily We Roll Along” revival, but its schedule appeared incompatible with his filming obligations, so he asked to talk.
“What started as one drink turned into a four-hour conversation about life and art, and we cried together, and we connected, and it wasn’t necessarily that the problems were all solved, but I felt seen and heard by her,” Groff said. (It did, in fact, work out, and he even won a Tony for his performance.) “She’s got a poeticism and a soulfulness. She is about the bottom line, as you have to be as a producer, but she somehow manages to hold the paradox of commerce and, right next to it, artistry.”
Friedman admits to seeking a personal connection to the material she produces, much of which she experiences as being about a search for home, for family, for roots. She saw her own story in “The Hills of California,” about artistic children in a messed-up family. Of “The Years,” a talk-of-the-town play about womanhood now running in London, she said, “that play is me.” But mostly she sees herself in Chekhov, as Sonia in “Uncle Vanya” and Irina in “Three Sisters” — two women who find their place in the world through work.
She is the rare producer who has occasionally accomplished the nearly impossible feat of reversing the fortunes of flagging shows.
Seizing the window offered by the pandemic shutdown, she helped oversee a consolidation of the New York production of the Tony-winning “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — a sequel to the novels — from two lengthy parts to one. This allowed the show, at the time the costliest nonmusical production mounted on Broadway, to finally earn a profit. Then last fall, starting with a production in Chicago, she oversaw a well-received trim to get the play’s running time below three hours, reducing its labor costs because shows that run longer than three hours incur overtime expenses.
When her recent “Funny Girl” revival was met with flagging ticket sales, she replaced the original star, Beanie Feldstein, who had received mixed reviews, with a fan favorite, Lea Michele, transforming a flop-in-the-making into a must-see hit.
Other producers have juggled multiple shows in a single season: Scott Rudin, for one, until renewed attention to his bullying behavior prompted him to step away from producing, and Seaview, an ambitious new player on the scene. Friedman has worked with both of them — she often collaborates with New York producers, as well as the city’s leading nonprofits, to get challenging work to the stage.
But the volume of Friedman’s work dwarfs that of most others. In all, she has produced more than 300 shows, and her shows have collected 63 Oliviers in the West End, and 48 Tonys in New York. Just this season on Broadway she brought “The Hills of California” and “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” from London; she is a lead producer of “Dead Outlaw,” an Off Broadway hit for Audible that is moving uptown; she is among the co-producers of “All In,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Redwood” and “Sunset Boulevard”; and she licensed “Eureka Day” for a nonprofit Broadway production.
She has an astonishing track record of wins, but also her share of wipeouts — the musical “New York, New York” was a recent big-budget disappointment. She has also had her share of high-priced tickets: “Merrily We Roll Along,” directed by Friedman’s sister Maria, was a huge hit, transforming that onetime flop’s place in the history books, but also costly to attend, especially late in the run, which, she acknowledged, opens her to accusations of hypocrisy.
But she said she’s always made sure her shows had a decent supply of lower-priced tickets, and now she’s more worried about accessibility for new and young audiences, on whom the future of the business (and the art form) depend.
“In one sense, Broadway is having a golden age because of all the work and all the stars and all the plays coming in,” she said. “But there’s no question we have a giant challenge. And what I’m asking for is everyone to come together — the theater owners, the unions, the agents, the advertising companies, the suppliers — to figure out what we want Broadway to be.”
Her pipeline is packed: She has about 40 shows in various stages of development, including the Paddington musical, which is to be staged in London this year, and “Millions,” adapted from the 2004 Danny Boyle film, which is to be staged in Atlanta this spring. She has two shows already announced for next season on Broadway, “Oedipus” and “The Queen of Versailles.”
“It’s almost like she’s created her own theater studio system,” said Judy Craymer, the lead producer of “Mamma Mia!” “She’s incredible, with great taste that has been proven 100 times.”
LATE LAST SUMMER she let me tag along with her, so I could get a sense of her nonstop work life. We met on a Wednesday morning at an arts center in an old town hall in North London; she arrived bleary-eyed, coffee-craving, already behind schedule. But by the time she reached the top of the stairs, clutching her soy latte, she had reached into some bottomless bag of restless energy and unbottled the pep.
She worked a rehearsal room like a politician, circling folding tables piled high with scripts and snacks, greeting a group of young American actors meeting their British counterparts for the first time. Together, they were rethinking the final act of “The Hills of California” for its transfer to Broadway, a familiar but nonetheless nerve-racking process for Friedman.
From there, she was scheduled to swing by “Stranger Things” auditions, but, frustrated that the car ordered for her wasn’t coming fast enough, instead invited that show’s director, Stephen Daldry, to her aerie-like West End office, hidden behind a secret door painted to look like a children’s bookcase, where they shared a smoke and juggled her three bichons frisés as he gave her an update.
“Sonia is very, very loyal, and loyalty is a rare gift,” Daldry said. “She is deeply, deeply respectful of the journey of the artist — even if she can see something isn’t going to work, she will back off and wait for me to find it. She doesn’t look for conflict to prove status or power.”
Back in North London, she popped into a designer’s studio to review the set for the West End production of “Oedipus,” which was looking good enough that she could duck out into an alley, smoking, swearing and pacing as she fielded a phone call. Then, after changing outfits at her office, it was off to the opening of “Shifters,” a rare West End drama written by and about Britons of African descent. It’s not only an example of the plays by emerging writers that she champions, but also a work that she felt a personal connection to (she said it had echoes of her recent breakup with a longtime boyfriend). Preshow, she whispered encouragement to the two-person cast, greeted Idris Elba (a co-producer), and Venmoed money to a panhandler. Postshow, she stopped by an after-party before catching a flight to New York to start all over again.
“I think I spend my whole life feeling slightly jet-lagged,” she said, “so I’m just used to it.”
Friedman, who declined to specify her age, attributes many of her passions and habits to an unusual upbringing. She has described her childhood as feral, and said it has informed many of her artistic and career choices. She was one of four children born to a violinist father who left the family around the time she was born and a pianist mother whom she has described as neglectful. The siblings, often left to fend for themselves, created their own theater troupe, which they called the Sonia Friedman Show. (She was the youngest.)
“My life was, from the earliest memory, telling stories,” she said. “That’s how we survived.”
School was a struggle, and at one point Friedman was expelled for truancy. By 13, she had left home for a free, and freewheeling, boarding school, and by 16 she was working full-time; with the help of her sister Maria, who was then a burgeoning actress, she found gigs at fringe shows and pub stages while taking night classes. She worked in a variety of crew capacities — most memorably, she was a follow-spot operator on a production of Stoppard’s “Jumpers,” but was fired for missing a cue.
At drama school, where she studied stage management, a fellow student was a daughter of Laurence Olivier, which led her, at 19, to a job interview with Olivier and his wife Joan Plowright; they hired her for a production at the Edinburgh fringe festival, and she was on her way. A big break came when the National Theater hired her to work with artists including Harold Pinter, who took her under his wing.
In time, she wanted more. “I got bored,” she said. “I became far more fascinated by the whole workings of the room.”
By then, it was the late 1980s, and the AIDS crisis was rampaging through the theater community. She threw herself into fund-raising, visiting hospitals, helping to run Shop Assistance, which enlisted celebrities to work in shops to generate money for AIDS charities. And then, after getting her first producing experiences making small-scale touring work for the National, she took another leap, cofounding a theater company called Out of Joint. One thing led to another, and the Ambassador Theater Group, a large British theater company, asked her to run one of its venues.
“I was a bit of a theater snob, but I was ambitious, and hungry to see if I could make it work,” she said. “I crave being challenged. I crave trying to figure out how to crack a nut.”
THE TRANSITION TO commercial producing, which began in 1999, was rough. Although she doesn’t dwell on it, she describes facing “huge sexism” early in her career. And she initially found pitching to investors “awful.” Her appetite for adventurous, often experimental, work led her to prioritize shows she thought were “important.”
“I couldn’t say I was in commercial theater for years and years,” she said, explaining that she didn’t like “what it stands for” and that instead she called herself “an independent producer.”
One near-constant in her career thus far: Ambassador Theater Group, which has been an important backer of her work. She has two production companies, one of which is an ATG subsidiary and one of which is independent; ATG has the option to invest in her shows, and she stages her work in the company’s theaters when possible.
The venture with Jackman, which she said should start presenting shows “soon,” is a way for her to start testing new ideas about producing more simply. She and Jackman have long admired each other — they previously collaborated on Butterworth’s 2014 play, “The River,” directed by Ian Rickson, who will serve as artistic director of the new company.
“Some of my best experiences have been when it’s just you and the actors and the text and a chair, so let’s see if we can do that,” she said. “We’re seeing if we can go back to where we started.”
Despite all the hurdles — the costs, the complexity, the ever-changing landscape, Friedman said she is intent on persevering, on stages big and small, British and American, ever compelled by the challenges.
“Why commercial theater?,” she asked at one point. “Why have I stuck at it when I used to leave everything once I cracked it? It’s because I haven’t cracked it. I haven’t solved it and I never will, and no one ever will. Which is great.”