Latest news with #SoniaFriedman
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct'
We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,' lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you've heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns. But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman's venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty's labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson's long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman's manhandling of an actual lawn mower. Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a 'world class college.' He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, 'racking up ex-wives like a maniac.' Currently he is separated from his third. Soon another cliché enters: the 'grossly underwritten' sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to 'expose their mediocrity.' That's Beatty's Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins. 'The erotics of pedagogy,' Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains. It is here you may say to yourself: I've seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays ('Oleanna') and novels ('Disgrace') — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man's point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie's lines are more like this: 'I shouldn't / I don't know why I / Said that / Sorry I'm mm.' Beatty, recently seen in Ibsen's 'Ghosts,' is all but ghostly here; she delivers Annie's halting vagueness so precisely that she at first seems merely underpowered as an actor. In fact, she's fulfilling the play's plan perfectly: Even if overwhelmed by Macklem's force majeure, she cannot seem like a victim. All but demanding his sexual attention, she tells Macklem that his books, in their crudity, taught her 'what I like.' She devours him hungrily, comparing him favorably to boys she has slept with. She shows him her own fiction, and laps up his besotted praise. She understands from the start, she says later, exactly what the 'exchange' was. So you're left to wonder: Who's grooming whom? And for what? With Macklem especially, the play wants to keep the issue of culpability unsettled as long as possible. That's a tough job, given the way time has trained us to presume absolute guilt in such situations; the affair takes place in 2014, a few years before #MeToo acquired its hashtag. Nor does Macklem's temper, which flares when Annie behaves in ways he considers irrational, give us confidence in his ability to transcend his ego. In those moments he seems merely bullheaded and cutting, a lot like that lawn mower. Who but Jackman could keep us guessing despite that? His onstage seductiveness has always been frank yet cheerful, its sharkiness couched in charm. When he played Peter Allen in 'The Boy From Oz,' women (and men) in the audience begged for his sweaty T-shirt at the end of the show. (In exchange for a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, he obliged them.) To take advantage of that appeal, Rickson has Jackman deliver a lot of his lines directly to the audience, at one point while seated at the lip of the stage with his legs dangling down as if he were Judy Garland. But Jackman goes well beyond the brief. On the night I attended, when a woman in Row B started coughing loudly, it was clear that the man who'd played the exuberant, audience-coddling Allen — Garland's son-in-law — was not about to leave her uncared-for. Ad libbing, he offered her a bottle of water — and was clearly ready to deliver it in person. She said no, but I was surprised that the 400 other theatergoers didn't start hacking immediately. He had them just where Macklem wanted Annie, and possibly vice versa. For an audience no less than an individual, the steep slope of powerful attraction is difficult to negotiate. Neither Macklem nor Annie (she's given no last name) is sure-footed. He's an overinflated balloon, blowing himself through life. She's, well, 19. Beyond any other consideration — attraction, power, psychology, class — her absolute age, not the gap in their ages, is what Moscovitch wants us to consider. Annie is not yet a fully grown human; she barely has the emotional wherewithal to handle her impulses, to know which ones she can safely indulge. Lest I spoil the ingenious working out of the story, I won't say more except that we meet Annie again when she does have that wherewithal. That both she and Macklem have aged we see at once by the simplest of means: posture, diction, a change of clothes for her, a change of glasses for him. (The costumes are by Ásta Bennie Hostetter.) Whether either character has grown is a different question, one you'll have to decide for yourself. Is revenge growth? Is growth itself revenge? That's the thrill of Rickson's production: It doesn't tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider. Better yet, it achieves that payoff with minimal fuss. The set (by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones) needs only a few chairs, a desk and a lamp to place you anywhere you need to be. Mikaal Sulaiman's sound consists mostly of faint music, the kind you sometimes think you hear while falling into a dream. There are no microphones; the actors' actual voices are hitting your actual ears. If this is theater on a shoestring, let the theater never have shoes. And though I'll wait to proclaim the Audible x Together experiment a sustainable success — at least until its next production, 'Creditors,' with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justice Smith, opens later this month — 'Sexual Misconduct' is proof of concept even as a one-off. Those cheap tickets buy you not only a seat at the Minetta Lane but also a place in the living conversation of raw yet thoughtful theater. Plus maybe, if you cough enough, a bottle of water.
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
13 Off Broadway Shows to See in May
Together, a new company founded by Hugh Jackman and the producer Sonia Friedman, kicks off with two plays presented in repertory at the Minetta Lane Theater, in collaboration with Audible. Jackman himself stars in Hannah Moscovitch's 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes' alongside Ella Beatty — and when was the last time we saw him in such an intimate space? Starting May 10, the show will alternate with a new adaptation of August Strindberg's 'Creditors' by Jen Silverman ('The Roommate'), starring Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justice Smith. Both productions are directed by Ian Rickson. (Through June 18, Minetta Lane Theater) Michael Thurber and Saheem Ali's new musical, with additional book material by James Ijames, is set in a nightclub in Mombasa, Kenya. Ali directs at the Public Theater, where he staged Ijames's hit play 'Fat Ham' before it transferred to Broadway. Amber Iman ('Lempicka') plays Nadira, a singer who actually is the title deity, Marimba, the ruler of music. (Through June 8, Public Theater) Skating? Been there, done that onstage, from 'Starlight Express' to 'Kimberly Akimbo.' Skateboarding is a much rarer beast. Now the Vineyard Theater is getting an in-the-round makeover to accommodate Nazareth Hassan's new play about hip-hop and the culture that gave us ollies and airwalks. A co-production with National Black Theater in association with the New Group. (Through June 8, Vineyard Theater)
New York Times
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How ‘Stranger Things' Scaled Up for Broadway
The cold open: In television, it's a scene that begins an episode before the title sequence, often without leading characters but almost always with foreshadowing hooks to confound or set a mood. Theater doesn't really have much of a cold open tradition. The expectation is that you introduce the main characters and get moving. Not so for 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow.' The new Broadway play, based on Netflix's hit horror-science fiction series, starts with a bold five-minute cold open of loud gunfire, marauding Demogorgons and no leading characters. It's a coup de théâtre, and it swiftly signals that the lead producers, the Broadway heavy-hitter Sonia Friedman and Netflix, are betting their big-money gamble will knock theatergoers' socks right off. 'We always wanted to open with a big scene and a big moment, something that's going to shock the audience,' said Ross Duffer, who, with his twin brother, Matt Duffer, created the 'Stranger Things' series. Both are credited as the play's creative producers. The play is a prequel to the 1980s-set TV series, and gives an origin story about a shy teenager named Henry Creel (played by Louis McCartney) who became an important figure in Season 4. It's set in small-town Hawkins, Ind., mostly in 1959. But the prologue takes place in 1943, and acts as an omen of the supernatural elements that drive the series, including the Upside Down, a sinister realm that parallels our own. Friedman credited the cold open to Stephen Daldry, the Tony-winning director who, with Justin Martin, directed 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' on Broadway. 'The instinct of most directors would be to leave that to a little bit later and build up to it,' Friedman said during an interview at the Marquis Theater, where the show is in previews before opening on April 22. 'Stephen was like, no, no, I want it right at the beginning.' The show overall and the cold open in particular were beasts to birth, said Friedman, even more so on Broadway than in London, where the play originated in 2023. The Marquis has about 600 more seats than the West End's Phoenix Theater, where the show is still running. 'I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: It's the most technical and challenging physical production that's probably ever been onstage,' Friedman said. And this is coming from a producer of 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,' which required a costly redo of the Lyric Theater and featured a slew of illusions that cost a pretty penny. And the bombast isn't cheap. 'Don't even ask me how much 'Stranger Things' is going to cost,' she was recently quoted saying in The New York Times. A Complex Sequence Afloat on a darkened stage are two rectangular boxes that look straight out of a graphic novel. Inside both boxes and in the aisles are crew members of the U.S.S. Eldridge, a battleship anchored in the harbor on a quiet night. Suddenly, screeching sounds break the stillness as the lights flicker, then go out. As stage fog washes over the first rows of the theater, the massive, fully realized hull of the battleship appears with a shock, tilting under an angry orange sky. From the murky waters — or is it from the otherworldly skies? — Demogorgons, the signature otherworldly monsters of 'Stranger Things,' brutally feast on an officer amid desperate screams and rapid gunfire. Then, in a moment that elicited cheers at a recent preview, the title sequence of 'Stranger Things' (the series) is projected onto a screen the width of the proscenium. Dramaturgically, the scene is rooted in the Philadelphia Experiment, a conspiracy theory that's long been a reference point for the Duffer Brothers. It posits that during World War II, an American ship traveled to another dimension after the U.S. government started experimenting with electromagnetic energy in its attempt to render ships invisible. Some of the crew were said to have gone mad in the 'jog across dimensions,' as the show's playwright, Kate Trefry, put it. In directing the cold open, Martin said he was inspired by the movie 'Alien,' specifically 'that moment of quiet in which you're building suspense, which is all about what you don't see.' He also pointed to a more theatrical and unusual source for a horror inspiration: The first minutes of 'The Lion King' on Broadway, when life-size puppet animals parade down the aisles and onto the stage. 'It's really punchy,' he said. 'You never forget it.' Much of the responsibility for painting a dramatic stage picture in so little time fell to Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, the illusions and visual effects designers. Harrison said that from the initial concept to the Broadway stage, the open — the 'most complex sequence' he's put onstage — took about two-and-a-half years to perfect. About 40 crew members, including stage managers and dressers, 'have been rehearsed to within a millisecond of their existence,' Harrison said, to help deploy some 75 cues that involve 'a whole lot of engineering,' including pulley systems and automation technology, on Miriam Buether's set. Benjamin Pearcy, a video and visual effects designer, said one of the biggest challenges in making the ship appear out of nowhere was ensuring that audiences couldn't tell the difference between the physical scenery and light that creates the illusion of space. To do so, several projectors installed around the auditorium work in tandem with a massive upstage LED wall to toy with depth perception. 'We're hiding where the real ship stops and where the extension of that ship is on the screen behind it,' he said. There's an entire set piece — a painted backdrop of an empty sky — that the audience sees for just seconds before it disappears, never to be seen again. 'The audience isn't going to necessarily even remember that they saw that for a moment,' Pearcy said. 'But if that hadn't been there, the appearance of the ship itself would not be the dramatic moment that it is.' Also at play is the retention of vision, a magic principle in which the magician flashes a coin in the light a second before it vanishes. The flash pushes the coin into the audience's mind just before it's gone and significantly heightens the effect. In the opening scene, the principle is used with stage lighting to reinforce an empty space just before it is filled. Harrison, who has a background in magic, said that in that moment the audience 'perceives more depth than perhaps there actually is.' What kept — keeps — the designers up at night? Making sure the effects and illusions, the kinds of things you only need to get right once for television, work on Broadway eight shows a week. Gary Beestone, the show's technical director, said the weight of the scenery presented structural challenges in the theater itself, which is inside the Marriott Marquis hotel and above a Levi's store. 'We found that there was a beam in the store that we needed to access in order to sign off getting the show to work,' Beestone said. Harrison said an unspecified 'supermassive structure' that weighs about 1,300 pounds has to move safely and quickly. 'That's about as much as I can say without being sued,' he added, laughing. 'Driven by Character and by Story' A 'live spectacle event': That's how the Marquis marquee describes 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow.' It's a boast that the producers hope will drive word of mouth. But it could also send the message that the show disfavors character development for 'cheap thrills, expensively made,' as Houman Barekat put it when he reviewed the London production for The New York Times. A writer also for the series, Trefry said the open strikes the same narrative balance as the rest of the show, between appealing to theatergoers who know nothing about the series and to 'Stranger Things' aficionados eager for a glimpse of what may come in the show's fifth and final season, which debuts later this year. (The play is based on an original story by Trefry, the Duffer Brothers and Jack Thorne.) Martin sounded confident that the show would not be the kind where people say: 'We've seen five magic tricks. When's the next one?' 'What we do is driven by character and by story,' he said. And by old-school theatermaking. Surprisingly, the Duffer Brothers sounded most animated when talking about a costume — just one way, Ross said, that the Broadway play is returning their baby to its humble first-season roots. 'The Demogorgon in Season 1 was a guy in a suit,' he said. 'To go back to doing that? It's a thrill.'
New York Times
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
She May Be the Most Powerful Producer Working in Theater
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 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.'
