a spy in her Topshop black-and-white striped trousers, black top, and Gucci leather jacket.“ Ha! Is Gucci a good thing? Make sure you put that in, then,” she says.
First on our list for this evening is Who’ s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Imelda Staunton and Imogen Poots. We slip through the stage door, and Friedman walks down the stairs and through the dark, winding corridors with the confidence of someone who could do this blindfolded. Staunton, who has been suffering from a throat infection, is onstage in rehearsal and hugs Friedman warmly.
“ If you need anything, anybody, anytime, call me. I’ m always five seconds away,” Friedman tells her.
“ Ooh, I’ ll start making a list,” says Staunton, smiling.
Next stop is The Book of Mormon, which Friedman brought over from New York; then Travesties, written by her friend Tom Stoppard. In the theater, Sam Mendes FaceTimes her.“ I’ ll call you back— I’ m backstage!” she shouts at her phone. She rolls her eyes at me and laughs:“ Always the wrong time, eh?”
We have just enough time to make it to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child( which she is coproducing with Colin Callender). She greets all the backstage crew by name, and they wave at her—“ Welcome back, Sonia! Thank you for the lovely email!”— as we hurry toward the cast, waiting for her on the Hogwarts set. Shoe bags of wands hang in the wings, as well as cards from fans, including Tom Cruise(“ Thank you all for a fantastic performance on Sunday”).“ I’ ve just been in New York and missed you all,” she says.“ Do you feel promiscuous, like you’ ve been with the New York Harry Potter and now you’ re back here with us?” asks the actor Jamie Parker, who plays Harry. Friedman loves the question.“ I do!” she says, laughing. A bell rings, meaning the audience is arriving. Friedman grabs my hand.“ Come on! If we’ re quick we might make The Glass
Menagerie!”
Friedman is widely hailed as the most powerful person in British theater. She put Madonna on the London stage( in 2002’ s Up for Grabs) and introduced Mark Rylance to Broadway( in plays including Jez Butterworth’ s Jerusalem, as well as Twelfth Night and Richard III. She will bring his latest, Farinelli and the King, to New York later this year). Mainly known for dramas, she also produces the classics, farce, musicals, and even TV( the BBC’ s Wolf Hall and an upcoming production of King Lear, starring Anthony Hopkins). The common denominator of them all is caliber: The credit“ Sonia Friedman Productions” is a guarantee of quality. This year her plays were nominated for a recordbreaking 31 Oliviers( the British equivalent of the Tonys), and she ended up winning eleven. Nine went to Harry Potter— another record, since no new play has previously won more than seven. In January, she picked up an Order of the
Wıth her tousled dark-blonde hair, crooked mouth, and husky smoker’ s laugh, she could be J. K. Rowling’ s naughty twin
British Empire from the queen for services to the theater.
“ She is, to use that dreadful phrase, the go-to theater producer,” says Stoppard.“ Every generation has one whom everyone wants to work with, and now it’ s Sonia. She’ s probably the busiest person I know; she crosses the Atlantic like other people cross the street.” Butterworth— whose new play, The Ferryman, opens in the West End this month, directed by Sam Mendes— describes her attentiveness.“ I know she has a million things going on, but when I’ m working with her I always feel like she’ s just doing my shows,” he says.“ She makes you feel special.”
To find Friedman in her office above a West End theater, you follow photos of her past productions and their stars up the stairway: Ralph Fiennes! Kristin Scott Thomas! Simon Russell Beale! Benedict Cumberbatch, as Hamlet, up in a corner! At the top, one of her 40-odd mostly female staff ushers me into a side room. Eventually her two bichon frises, Teddy and Buddy, trot in, like knights announcing the arrival of a queen. And what a regal entrance she makes, talking 20 miles to the minute before she even sits down, a vision of London chic in a Biba – style white fake fur coat, dark velour Donna Karan trousers tucked into chunky high heeled boots, and a silky black chemise top that shows an impressive amount of skin for the English weather.
“ Sonia,” Stoppard tells me later with some understatement,“ does not look like a typical theater producer. She is much cooler than that.” In fact, with her tousled dark-blonde hair, crooked mouth, and husky smoker’ s laugh, she could be Joanne— better known as J. K.— Rowling’ s naughty twin.
“ Jo and I look very, very similar, and we’ re the same age,” says Friedman, who is 52 and first visited Rowling in the author’ s hometown of Edinburgh in 2013. But physical resemblances were only the start of how Friedman got Rowling to agree to a Harry Potter play, succeeding where so many before her had failed.
For a while— a lifetime, really— Friedman had been stewing over a question: Do great men make good fathers? And Harry, she realized, was the perfect vehicle through which to explore it. Rowling loved the idea.“ We immediately connected over being daughters of difficult dads,” Friedman says.
Rowling has spoken out about her estrangement from her father, and Friedman’ s relationship with hers was even more fraught. A celebrated violinist, Leonard Friedman left his wife the year Sonia, their fourth child, was born, and barely looked back.“ I’ d see him once a year, maybe— he certainly never knew my birthday or said he loved me. He would shake my hand; it was that kind of relationship. Things like that form you. So I was always fascinated with how so-called Great Men cope with being fathers,” she says.
As for the play, Broadway regulars may suspect they’ re too jaded by years of jazzy onstage pyrotechnics to be excited by magic wands. Well, they’ re in for a big surprise. When I saw the production in London, I gasped aloud watching papers tidy themselves on desks and human figures disappear inside telephones. And don’ t get me started on the time travel.
“ It is quite clever, isn’ t it?” says the director, John Tiffany.“ But we didn’ t use a huge amount of technology, because
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