Sonia Friedman News

Performances of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child begin at Broadway’s Lyric Theatre in New York on November 16, 2021. Broadway tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday, July 12, 2021. Now, the show has been boldly restaged as one singular performance.

We have been to space; now it’s party time. Following Amy Berryman’s Walden, Sonia Friedman Productions’ RE:EMERGE season continues at the Harold Pinter Theatre with Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert. Set in the annual Notting Hill Carnival in 2017, Joseph’s spirited debut play was first produced in 2019 at Theatre503, in a staging that also marked the directorial debut of actor Rebekah Murrell. In the play’s West End outing, Murrell is once again at the helm, and the result is a joyous, plucky work that thrusts us into a communal tradition as experienced by three young women.

Bristol Old Vic today announced a bold season for Autumn–Winter 2021/22. The programme includes new productions from brilliant talent, long-awaited new dates for world premieres and new ways to share those stories live and online.

Directed by ATC's Artistic Director Matthew Xia, this site-responsive outdoor production is designed by Sandra Falase (J'Ouvert, Sonia Friedman Prods., Romeo and Juliet – Orange Tree), with music by Fran Rivers (Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Award winner, 2021; Othello, NYT) and movement by Vicki Igbokwe (founder and creative director of Uchenna Dance, Mass Movement Choreographer, Olympic & Paralympic Ceremonies).

Another show has announced its return to Broadway! Producer Anne Garefino announced today that THE BOOK OF MORMON, winner of nine 2011 Tony Awards® including Best Musical and the Grammy® for Best Musical Theatre Album, will once again say ‘Hello!’ to Broadway. Get the scoop on when it's returning, how to get tickets, and more!

Producer Sonia Friedman has penned an article for The Telegraph about her fears for the future of the West End. Friedman went on to say that the UK Government must step in and help out in order to save the industry

Opening with Amy Berryman's Walden and continuing with J'Ouvert and Anna X, the season of plays curated by Sonia Friedman Productions with Ian Rickson tackles urgent issues integral to rebuilding our society, including structural inequality, climate change and the economics of truth in an internet age.

The producers of Mean Girls have announced the North American Tour will relaunch this November following an 85-week hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The record-breaking musical will resume performances with a one-week engagement at ASU Gammage in Tempe, AZ, from November 2-7, 2021, before continuing to 40+ cities across North America.

The joint winner of The Women's Prize for Playwriting 2020 Ahlam will have a staged reading of  their debut play You Bury Me as part of a festival of new work at the Edinburgh International Festival at the Royal Lyceum Theatre this summer.

And they're off! London theatres have been open for several weeks now, and the reviews once again are coming hard and fast as a glance at this very site will confirm. Quick off the mark have been the smaller-sized shows: solo plays like Cruise or Harm or a three-person West End entry like Amy Berryman's Walden (though that title was beset by pre-opening dramas of its own, more of which below). But as the big musicals prepare their own re-emergence on to a scene marked out already by the producer Sonia Friedman's RE:EMERGE season (of which Walden is the first of three to open), excitement is in the air. The question now remains as to who, precisely, the audience is likely to be for these shows, given the difficulty for many in travelling to the UK.

To use any other word than ‘crisis’ to describe what is happening with today’s climate is ridiculous. Temperatures rise, natural resources dwindle and human beings waste more than ever. Is our planet saveable? Can we heal mother earth, or is it better to admit defeat and divert all resources into finding another place to build a sustainable ecosystem. This is the main question grappled with in Amy Berryman’s Walden.

During the time I was running a theatre my boyfriend used to say that the difference between Monday to Saturday and then Sunday was that all the days of the week were the same, except that on Sunday there was somebody on the sofa fast asleep. And so it was that after eighteen years and something like 200 shows I decided enough was enough, it was time to go.

Amy Berryman's Walden, which is currently playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre, has announced that it will pause performances this evening, May 25, after a COVID threat arose within the company.

On Sunday 16 May The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama's Keep Creating Gala, featuring appearances from alumni including Riz Ahmed, Dame Judi Dench, Sonia Friedman, Michael Grandage, Jason Isaacs, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Toby Olié, Sir Tony Robinson, Catherine Tate and more, raised over £26,000 to support Central students impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic. 

The first show of the Harold Pinter Theatre RE:EMERGE season is Amy Berryman’s Walden. Get a peek inside rehearsals!

The Broadway musical Mean Girls which closed in 2020, is set to be adapted to a major motion picture from Paramount Pictures. Creator Tina Fey shared more details about the project.

The fabled date is getting nearer!  For months, May 17 has loomed large in the calendar of London theatreland as the signal for playhouses to reopen their doors after a five-month lockdown - a period of closure that has, of course, been much longer in New York for the simple reason that London theaters did at least flicker partially to life last autumn.

Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert broadcasts on BBC Four this evening as part of the BBC’s Lights Up season, ahead of opening at the Harold Pinter Theatre as part of Sonia Friedman Productions RE:EMERGE season, which also includes Amy Berryman’s Walden and Joseph Charlton’s Anna X.

The first ever UK tour of hit musical Dreamgirls, which was due to start in 2020, will now open at the Liverpool Empire Theatre this December before visiting cities right across the country throughout 2022 and into 2023.

Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt, directed by Patrick Marber and produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, will return to Wyndham's Theatre for a 12-week run from 7 August – 30 October 2021.