Superproducer Sonia Friedman on building a theatre empire

As LondonTheatre.co.uk continues to celebrate its 30-year anniversary, we speak to superproducer Sonia Friedman about her latest productions, biggest successes, and the changing theatre landscape.

Five days before Sonia Friedman pitched up in London for an interview, she was seated among the New York audience at the 78th annual Tony Awards. She was in attendance as the lead producer on several contenders for Broadway’s highest honour, including the New York transfer of her West End hit Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the Broadway transfer of Jez Butterworth’s latest, The Hills of California and the dazzling if decidedly offbeat seven-time-nominated musical Dead Outlaw, which closed on 29 June.

"I'm very, very proud of Dead Outlaw," Friedman says from her Covent Garden office, one of her beloved bichon dogs, Daisy, in the background. "It's a tough sell commercially but I love it because it's unconventional. It's so wildly original, beautiful, and bizarre, and of course it feeds into everything I love about storytelling, which is that it's utterly surprising. You have no idea where it will go next."

Hotfooting it back to London – “I’ve been basically commuting to New York since January” – she has been busy shepherding into the West End last year’s Tony-winning sensation, the epic play Stereophonic, which garnered more Tony nominations (13) than any Broadway play ever and won three, starting, once again, with Best Play.

"If you pierce the zeitgeist in New York, your play can be, like Stereophonic, a phenomenon: it can explode and become unstoppable," she says. "Shows like Stereophonic are great, and so the challenge, maybe, is that everything has to be as great as that." In other words, she is setting her own bar very high.

The evening before our interview, Friedman had been at a gala performance of the 3-hour, 15-minute transfer from Broadway to the Duke of York’s – every minute of it riveting – so you entirely understand when she claims the following afternoon to be tired, before giving tirelessly of herself in conversation across 80 minutes. We might still be talking were she not busy presiding over what since its 2002 inception has become the most dynamic and diverse — and most important — commercial producing entity in the English-language theatre. Over 300 productions, 67 Olivier Awards. The stats are dizzying.

What defines a Sonia Friedman show? “I have to say, it’s impossible to define taste: how can you?” she says. “Only I can taste what I taste.” But before long she is enumerating a passion for “musicals, both new and revivals, Shakespeare, Pinter, Stoppard, classics, and obviously new work right at the centre of it” – wherever, in other words, she comes across material that “makes me tingle, genuinely” and that catches her offguard. That can mean Leopoldstadt one minute, Emma Corrin in Anna X the next.

Born into a family of musicians (her instrument was the cello), Friedman talks about latching on to “the rhythms” of material she admires “where something just goes through my body. And if I start imagining it in 3D while I’m reading it, that’s the crucial one. It’s about being in the present with the work.”

The odd misfire inevitably notwithstanding, her shows more often than not score. I count quite a few of her productions among high points of my own playgoing, including Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, for which Olivier, Tony, and Academy Award winner Mark Rylance won the second of his three Tonys in 2011. The first was for his Broadway debut three years earlier in the Friedman-produced Boeing Boeing: "New York really loves discovering a great actor. Of course they love a movie star, but what they love more than anything is finding the next star and lifting them up. Nobody knew who Mark was when he first went to Broadway with Boeing Boeing and look at him now."

Friedman loves to promote and nurture talent: actors like Rylance or Patsy Ferran, to name just two, or directors like Robert Icke, whose recent, Olivier-winning Oedipus, with Lesley Manville and Mark Strong, will no doubt return her to the Tony race next June following its Broadway transfer this autumn.

It can’t be easy sustaining both this quality of work and the volume, which in November finds the long-awaited Paddington the Musical opening at the Savoy, not long after Friedman transfers to the Noël Coward Theatre the director Max Webster’s National Theatre revival of The Importance of Being Earnest, with Olly Alexander taking over the role of Algernon Moncrieff from Ncuti Gatwa.

“We run things from a position of art first,” she says of her company, which couples a 50-strong staff in Covent Garden with a satellite office of two in New York. “I’ve always been art-led: the art comes first and then the business model after. It’s never been about what’s going to make me money – ever ever ever.”

You sense a deep-rooted interest in the thrill of the chase: “I don’t know why, but I’m fascinated by challenges. I’m built that way, my brain is built that way: if it’s easy, I’m not interested.” The result allows hugely ambitious, outsized ventures like Stranger Things and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – plays conceived on the scale of musicals – to co-exist with West End transfers of Benedict Lombe’s glorious two-hander Shifters, and, a particular passion project for Friedman, the transfer from the Almeida to the Harold Pinter Theatre of writer-director Eline Arbo’s all-female The Years.

This adaptation of Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux’s memoir was, says Friedman, “sort of a summation of my life and my career. It sounds very grand but with that play it was like, ‘there I am; that’s me.’ So much of my work is about taste and instinct and what I feel audiences are going to respond to, but rarely have I done work that’s about me.” She went along as a punter to see it at the Almeida and was “so blown away emotionally that I almost had to be carried out. I said, ‘I have to do this, I have to make this one happen for me’ and hoped that others felt the same.” They did, the show recouped, and Friedman is now looking at an onward life for it in New York.

Broadway shows are prohibitively pricey – musicals budgeted in the tens of millions require weekly running costs close to $1 million – and an impassioned Friedman speaks of an unsustainable model of New York producing “grinding on”, allowing only the occasional play (Stereophonic, for one) to break away from the pack. Increasingly, too many shows bow within too short a March-April window, so as to qualify for that elusive Tony: “You have 25 shows opening within the same five-week period. It’s more and more intense and harder and harder to gain traction, which is an almost impossible way to create work.”

The appeal, of course, remains the singular excitement and buzz of the New York theatre, however risky, set against a London ecosystem where recoupment is far more frequent and where the gathering synergy between the subsidised and commercial sectors, she says, is here to stay. “I do think in this new world with arts funding cut to smithereens that the commercial and the subsidised are going to have to have a much closer relationship going forward: much more transparent and open given how much we’re feeding off one another.” Having worked early on at the National and then co-founded the Out of Joint touring company with the Royal Court grandee Max Stafford-Clark, Friedman talks of owing her career to Britain’s vanishing tradition of theatrical subsidy.

In the near future, Friedman is excited about a revolutionary new Earnest that, in her view, follows the Royal Court’s time-honoured paradigm of treating a new play like a classic and a classic like a new play: “I saw it and thought, this is absolutely revelatory, freshly minted. Max has done an incredible job of reinventing Wilde for today.”

With a score by Tom Fletcher and book by Jessica Swale, Paddington, meanwhile, tells a resonant, timely tale of what its producer calls “an outsider who’s been told London will welcome them but who then comes to London and finds it harder than he thought it was going to be, but through his innate goodness, kindness, and innocence causes people around him to change. He’s a good bear, a kind bear, and he only sees the good in others.”

She admits to being as excited about Paddington as she was about Harry Potter, adding: "The way we are doing the bear is a giant secret but everyone who sees the bear for the first time bursts into tears. It's taken six years to develop the bear, and the show has been incubated for eight years with utter love and devotion."

“It’s going to be funny and entertaining, and the music’s amazing and the set’s extraordinary. But at its heart,” says Friedman, “is a show about how we can all be better.” Think of it as an expression of optimism for the future from a producer who, you strongly feel, wants only the best.

Book Stereophonic and The Importance of Being Earnest tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Sonia Friedman. (Photo by Sophie Gladstone). Inset: Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Stereophonic, Oedipus, Olly Alexander in The Importance of Being Earnest artwork, The Years, Paddington artwork. (All courtesy of productions)