The Friedman sisters have been making art together since they were little. Their London childhood was chaotic – they were often left to their own devices – but the family’s four children found comfort in storytelling.
Today, Sonia, 59, is one of the most successful theater producers in the English-speaking world. Maria, 64, is a famous actress and singer. Their sister is a scientist and their brother, who died last year, was a violinist.
Sonia and Maria have occasionally worked together over the years, but rarely with as much emotional investment as on the current Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which Maria directs and Sonia produces. This revival has transformed the show, which, despite Stephen Sondheim’s much-loved songs, was a famous failure when it first aired in 1981, and is now one of the hottest tickets in town.
On Sunday night, the Friedman sisters’ production won a Tony Award for best musical revival, as well as performance awards for two of its stars, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, and another for its orchestrations. This didn’t win out for Maria’s management, however, making their evening bittersweet.
“My heart broke into 2,000 pieces,” said Sonia Friedman, who has a shelf full of Tony Awards but just wanted her sister to be recognized. She said she had to get out of the theater to pull herself together. “The little sister in me suffered from an older sister who only held me and supported me.”
A few minutes later, the sisters went on stage together to collect the Tony for the production that Sonia dedicated to Maria.
“Winning the Tony was fantastic, for Steve and for the legacy,” Maria said the next day. “Losing was painful.”
But she also said that during the Tony season, she became friends with the other nominees and admired them all. She particularly congratulated Danya Taymor, who won the directing award for a new musical “The Outsiders.” “I’ve seen her work and I think she absolutely deserves this,” Maria said. “I don’t feel like I’ve been robbed.”
“Merrily,” with music by Sondheim and book by George Furth, is a reverse-chronological depiction of the implosion of a three-way friendship. The revival, which ends its limited run at the Hudson Theater on July 7, is both acclaimed and profitable — in other words, to quote the title of a song from the show, “It’s a Hit!” » This week, the Friedmans plan to film this revival.
The two sisters discussed their long history with “Merrily,” and their even longer history with each other, in a joint interview over steak salads at Gallaghers, a century-old Theater District haunt. Late afternoon lunch – they stayed up until the wee hours, first at a “Merrily” after-party at the Ascent Lounge, then at a star-studded after-after-party and the show at the Carlyle Hotel – had been scheduled before they knew how their evening would go.
They both said they saw the production as a tribute to Sondheim, with whom Maria had a close friendship forged over years performing his work in England. The “Merrily” production had been planned before his death in 2021; Maria said that when he died, she thought about canceling, but she was convinced that wasn’t what he would have wanted.
“As I started working on it, in the room, I realized it hadn’t gone anywhere,” Maria said. “He’s in every corner of this room. It is in every molecule. And so the fact that it won Best Revival surpasses everything. »
The two sisters are quite close. As a child, Maria often looked after Sonia; as an adult, Sonia returned the favor, particularly during Maria’s two battles with cancer. They are fiercely proud of each other and obviously love each other: whenever the conversation became emotional, each sister would turn to the other for comfort. Sonia described them as “on a raft together”.
Their childhoods were, at best, unorthodox and often downright neglectful: they say that if they had been born a few decades later, they would have been placed in foster care. Their father, a prominent violinist, left around the time of Sonia’s birth; their mother, a polymathic pianist, had no aptitude or interest in parenting, and the children were largely left to their own devices when it came to basic things like finding food or going to school. ‘school. They describe themselves as having been abandoned and disrespected; Maria called the children “savages.”
“We were actually four kids supporting each other in every way,” Sonia said. “Our schooling was incompetent. Often we didn’t go there. But what we did was create stories. We improvised stories, music and dances.
When Sonia was 10, conditions at home were getting worse and her three older siblings moved away for reasons of survival. Maria was only 15 when she left.
“There was this crack, this tear,” Sonia said. “We don’t need to go into detail about what happened in the house, but what’s important is that I had to get lost in stories. I had lost everything.
Sonia threw herself into her dollhouse, escaping the drama she imagined concerning the daily lives of her dolls. At one point, she was kicked out of school for truancy; she says her life was saved by a community council that paid to send her to boarding school.
Throughout her childhood, Sonia accompanied Maria as the eldest daughter obtained theater roles; As Maria began to build an acting career, Sonia began to imagine a life behind the scenes.
They both enjoyed some success when they first collaborated professionally, in 1994, on “Maria Friedman by Special Arrangement”, a cabaret show based on songs Maria had first performed at a festival created by their father. Their brother played in the band; their father, who they reconnected with as adults, was initially involved, but then died before the series transferred to the West End.
There have been other joint projects over the years – “Ragtime” in London in 2003 and “The Woman in White” on Broadway in 2005. But there was nothing like “Merrily,” a show to which Maria has been linked for three decades, and which she has now performed seven times.
Maria’s relationship with ‘Merrily’ dates back to 1992, when she starred in a production in Leicester; Both Sondheim and Furth were alive at the time and revising their work after the Broadway disappointment.
Two decades later, Maria directed a student production of “Merrily” at a London drama school – it was the first time she had directed anything, and when Sonia came to see it, she not only cried, but also had a moment of clarity about her sister’s skills as she watched actors devour Maria’s ideas. “Damn, she’s a director!” Sonia remembers thinking.
Sonia attended the school’s production with David Babani, the artistic director of the Menier Chocolaterie in London; the two decided to ask Sondheim for permission to mount a professional production, which he granted. This production was a success and Maria directed subsequent productions in the West End, Japan and Boston before mounting the production with Radcliffe, Groff and Lindsay Mendez, first Off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop in 2022, then on Broadway. from last October.
“Steve wrote a masterpiece and I gave it everything I had,” Maria said. “I gave him my heart, my soul, my mind, my brain and my experience, and he continues to give me something.”
Sonia always accompanied her. “It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “Because of the story of ‘Merrily,’ it forces you to look back on your life, and the choices you’ve made, the paths you’ve taken, the mistakes along the way. And if you’re producing this with your sister, you can’t watch it from the back of the auditorium and not follow your own life through it.
Both reject the idea that they had decided to save the show, which Maria said would be “arrogant”. Sonia said she didn’t even consider the original production a failure, but as “a series that hadn’t found its way.”
But they also said that the show’s intense storyline — it always had a passionate group of fans, even if it didn’t really work — is much more present in the United States than in England. But by entertaining it in London, they felt the pull of New York.
“There was like this call: Please bring ‘Merrily’ home,” Sonia said. “It deserves to be up there, under the lights of Broadway, as a hit.” He needed this redemption story.
Each of them said that even after years of seeing performances of “Merrily,” it continues to resonate deeply. “It’s so sublime, and as we grow, I can’t listen to it, I can’t experience it, without having a deep, profound cathartic reaction,” Sonia said.
Maria agreed, saying, “It’s pretty much a lifetime, and ‘Merrily’ transforms with us,” she said. “He asks us: ‘How did I get here?’ »