West End and Broadway theatre producer Sonia Friedman has just taken Australian musical Fangirls to London, opening to rave reviews. Her pressence in the credits speaks volumes for the show’s ambition. It seems that a West End run is definitely on the cards, and who knows from there.
In 2017, I was lucky enough to sit down with Friedman for an hour to talk theatre (and dogs) for DOG Magazine. At the time, Sonia Friedman Productions was about to open Harry Potter & The Cursed Child on Broadway, and Friedman cryptically teased me about the fact she had the script for a new Tom Stoppard play (the then unannounced Leopoldstadt).
Over the years I would see Friedman a number of times. She was always busy, always keeping an eye on her shows. I once saw her sit on a step at the back of London’s Noël Coward Theatre during a performance of the 6.5 hour long play The Inheritance (which she produced) because she wouldn’t take a seat in case someone came late to the box office looking for a ticket. She was a fascinating subject. Seeing as the magazine issue is no longer in print, and the interview was never published online, I’ve received permission from Julian Victoria, editor of DOG, to republish the text and images here.
“Did you know you can clone dogs now?” Sonia Friedman says as she sits on the sofa in her Covent Garden office with her Bichon Frises, Teddy and Buddy, on either side. “I know of somebody who’s cloned his dog in America. He’s a multi-millionaire and loved his dog so much he cloned him.”
It says a lot about the circles this theatre producer moves in, that the world of cloning beloved pets is not out of the question. From beginnings that are almost too clichéd to call humble, to her current position at the head of the West End and Broadway, Sonia Friedman is the heart, mind and soul behind a decade of theatre’s biggest hits.
“I’m not a director, I’m not a writer, I’m not an actor, I’m not a composer; if I was I’d be doing it. I know what I’m good at. It’s a 50/50 split between creative instincts and business skills.”
This blend of art and commerce has made her the most powerful person in British theatre and beyond. If you’ve been to the theatre in the last decade, you’ve likely come into contact with some of her work: sold out runs of Dreamgirls, The Book of Mormon, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet, David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s Much Ado About Nothing, Sheridan Smith’s Legally Blonde, and critical darlings Chimerica, King Charles III and Jerusalem, along with major productions starring the likes of Keira Knightley, Samuel L. Jackson, Jim Broadbent, Kristin Scott Thomas and Hugh Jackman. And that’s all before we reach the behemoth that is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – the two-part theatrical continuation of the book and film franchise that has been booked solid in London since it was announced two years ago, and is about to descend on Broadway audiences.
Instead of cynically throwing a celebrity into a well-known classic, Friedman has made a name for herself for championing new writing and carefully picking revivals that really have something to say.
“Absolutely every show I do is me. It’s my taste. I get very defensive if people assume I’m just there to write cheques,” she says. “The producer has all the business responsibility as well as the ultimate creative responsibility. As the producer, I usually come up with or respond to an idea then find the director and, if it’s a new play, I commission or option the writer. My job is to create the infrastructure for the creative team to do their best possible work. The trite phrase is you do ‘everything from page to stage’, overseeing every single aspect of the production.”
Friedman’s office is a calm oasis in the middle of the Sonia Friedman Productions floor, painted a cool dark blue, with dark furnishings. A glass door to the left opens out onto a room filled with her staff, and the door to the right leads to meeting spaces and a conference room. Scattered around her desk are the familiar clues of dog occupation – beds, bowls and toys. As the staff move around, doors are opened for Teddy and Buddy as if by second nature.
“Anybody who knows me knows I come with the dogs! With every show I’ve ever worked on they’re there at the meet and greet, in the stalls, backstage, at the stage door – they are part of the company. They allow me to be me and do my job and tackle my challenges. They genuinely help me to relax. I’m better as a boss, as a person, as a strategist, with a dog over there in the corner. They help me put things in order in my head so I’m able to think about the things that worry me in a much calmer way. I’ll sit down and work out what to do while Teddy’s on my lap, then I can go again.”
Friedman grew up in an artistic household. The daughter of two professional musicians (her father left when she was born), she was surrounded by creative siblings including brother Ricky, also a professional musician, and sister Maria, a noted performer and director. She has another sister, Sarah, and a younger half brother, Ben. Growing up, the family had a dog, Nicky.
“Nicky came into the family when I was about two and a half years old. He was absolutely everything to me. When I was young, I believed that he was actually a prince; that when I left the room he became a prince and when I came back he became a dog again. I absolutely believed that he was put there to look after me, a prince disguised as a dog! As children we made up plays and stories all the time, and on my own, that was my story. My private world with my dog. As I’m talking about him now I’m tearing up because I loved him so much. Anyone who owns a pet will understand that. Pet owners, we’re like this gang. When you lose a pet, it’s a death in the family and we get that. People who don’t have them don’t understand.”
As an adult her allergies led her to adopt Bichon Frises – first Teddy, then Buddy. “I knew it had to be a little dog I could easily travel around with and one which was as hypoallergenic as possible.” It’s no surprise that for Friedman, the theatre and her dogs are so closely linked.
“I named her Teddy because I got her when I was doing a play called Faith Healer in New York. It was a huge hit and there was a vaudevillian character in it that I loved named Teddy. So I named the dog Teddy even though she’s a girl. Also, she looks like a teddy bear! The other is named Buddy for a much more personal reason. My partner is quite a lot younger than me and there’s a song in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies that my sister Maria sings sometimes called, ‘In Buddy’s Eyes’. It’s a beautiful song about being ageless. “Teddy and Buddy genuinely got me through some dark times both personally and professionally. Teddy got me up in the morning; Teddy needed to go for a walk, Teddy needed feeding. She would come up to me and lick me on the nose and wag her tail. How ever sad I was she would sit there, this little ball of fluff, wagging her tail so crazily I thought she would fall over, and would make me smile.”
Instead of planting herself in a luxury apartment in the centre of London’s theatreland, a converted pub in Stepney Green (“proper East London”) is where Sonia calls home. “I’m anonymous there. It gives me more perspective on the world. You also find places that you feel safe with dogs and you gravitate there and stay there. My social life is built around where I can take the dogs. In East London it’s definitely Victoria Park. We went last Sunday and there was a dog show going on and we entered Teddy and Buddy. At one point my niece said, “Shall I tell them you’re the producer of Harry Potter? If you won it would be great publicity.” I said “Yes!” and then a minute later, “No! They’re going to win in their own right!” They didn’t win and I was very upset,” she laughs.
Theatre is at its most powerful when it reflects society’s bubbling subconscious back to itself, and Friedman’s current crop of plays like Ink and The Ferryman have a lot to say about the state of the world today. She took Headlong Theatre’s long-running adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 to America this year. Debuting in 2014 in the UK and receiving multiple return seasons in London and internationally, Friedman knew 2017 was the right time to take the show to Broadway. The story of fascism and ‘fake news’ was reportedly so prescient it had audience members fainting in the aisles.
“Taking 1984 to Broadway right now was absolutely a deliberate choice. We were responding to a war cry when the book went back to the top of the best-seller lists. Theatre is always an opportunity to respond to ‘now’. Each show running is responding in its own way. Some are about total escape, like with Dreamgirls it’s about shutting the doors for two hours and just exhilarating in the human voice. The Ferryman is overtly political, exploring cyclical violence and terrorism breeding through generations.”
Despite years of austerity and cuts to arts funding, London’s theatre scene continues to perform strongly. The unique blend of commercial theatre on the West End and government subsidised theatres like the National give London an edge over Broadway – something Friedman credits to pioneers like the late Peter Hall.
“We have a lot more theatres than Broadway. We are having this conversation two days after Peter Hall passed away, and thanks to him our theatre scene is alive and healthy. He led the way for subsidised theatre as we know it, but subsidised theatre is under threat right now, especially regionally. I’m a creature of the subsidised theatre; it’s where I come from. It’s responsible for creating and nurturing all of our creative talent that feed into television and film. Look at the screenwriting and directing credits – so many started in theatre and specifically subsidised theatre. Theatre is in our culture, it’s in the DNA of this country. As a culture and as a nation we will always need stories. We’re a country of extraordinary storytellers.”
For a person as busy as she is, time is a premium. A self-confessed workaholic, Friedman seldom gets to relax and read anything that’s not directly related to her job.
“Sitting down and opening a book by the fire? No, that doesn’t happen for me.” And she rarely gets to the cinema unless she has some connection to the film. “I went to ‘Dunkirk’ because of Mark Rylance, and Tom Glynn-Carney from The Ferryman is in it. It was a work of genius.”
Going to the theatre for pure pleasure is a tough task, too. “To put things into context, I’m at the theatre five nights a week and in the office 14 hours a day so it’s hard for me to get cultural nourishment from anything other than what I’m doing. It’s rare, but it’s a joy when it happens. Most of the time when I go to the theatre I’m watching the mechanics of how it’s done. For me, a show works when I completely forget all that. The Girl from the North Country [the Bob Dylan musical] at The Old Vic is a great example; within minutes I was just in heaven, in awe and swept up in it. I completely forgot about everything and was just another person in the audience.”
But for Friedman the real escape is to leave London and take her dogs to the Hampshire countryside. “We have a beautiful cottage in 400 acres of woodland. Just before we get there, Teddy and Buddy start barking in the car because they know. I don’t get out there anywhere near enough – maybe once every three or four weeks. The wifi signal is awful so you get to shut down from the world.”
With the run-away success of the Harry Potter plays it’s impossible not to wonder what could be Sonia Friedman’s next challenge, but she says: “I don’t think about things as being challenges. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was never intended to be this big. That wasn’t what I set out to do. I just wanted to create a great piece of theatre with incredible storytelling at its heart. All I can say is, you never know what’s coming to you. Sometimes the best pieces of theatre come as a result of a suddenly empty space in the West End. Every now and then I’ll get a call saying, “We’ve got an eight week slot free, got any ideas?” and I love that.”
One notable example was Jennifer Haley’s dark, morally ambiguous cyber-thriller The Nether. The Black Mirror-esque tale of virtual reality was staged at London’s acclaimed incubator of new writing, the Royal Court Theatre. Friedman transferred it to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End to reach a bigger audience.
“I bloody love The Nether. I had no intention of doing anything with it when I went. My friend [Es Devlin] was the designer and she begged me to go and see it. I got to the last performance of its three week run and was just blown away. I said we have to do it, we have to take it to the West End. I actually think I should bring it back. It closed just as it was really getting going, just when it had some momentum, but it had to come off as the theatre was already booked for another show.”
This is where the talk of cloning dogs comes into our conversation. So how did things work out for her multi-millionaire acquaintance? “I don’t know, I should call and find out! I got Buddy so I could train her under Teddy; that way I could have another one the same. Obviously Buddy turned out nothing like Teddy. She couldn’t be more different,” laughs Friedman with a note of joyful resignation.
“Totally different personality. Everything different. But still perfect.” She muses, “I have never ever been unhappy when I’ve been with my dogs. They are my constant. I’m an example of a person who benefits in every way from having a pet. They are genuinely the reason I can do what I do. I love them unconditionally. At Christmas, most theatre companies or producers send out a very corporate looking Christmas card listing all their shows for the year. Ours is never that, it’s my dogs on the front. If I stepped back and thought I’d become one of those people who sends out a doggy Christmas card I’d think it’s a bit embarrassing. But it’s not for me, because they make me smile. It’s about not taking the job of a theatre producer too seriously.”
Cultural Binge 
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