Maria Friedman Is Rearranged Again in West End

Maria Friedman will bring her latest acclaimed concert show Maria Friedman: Rearranged to the West End’s Trafalgar Studios for 25 performances only from 27 November 2008 to 4 January 2008. The concert will run concurrently with children’s show Horrid Henry – Live and Horrid, which, midweek, has early evening performances at 6pm, followed by Maria Friedman: Rearranged at 8.30pm (See News, 28 Oct 2008). Both will also run on Saturdays and Sundays.

Friedman and Horrid Henry fill the programming gap created in Trafalgar Studios 1 by the premature closure this past weekend of Andrew Upton’s Australian play Riflemind, directed by Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (See News, 17 Oct 2008).

Maria Friedman: Rearranged premiered earlier this year at the Menier Chocolate Factory, where it run from March to May (See News, 5 Feb 2008). The show is a follow-up to Friedman’s Olivier Award-winning 1995 show By Special Arrangement. Accompanied by an 11-piece band, Friedman performs new rearranged versions of some of her favourite show tunes and contemporary songs, from the likes of Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Herman, Michel Legrand, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Randy Newman, Stephen Sondheim, Charles Strouse and Suzanne Vega. The show runs for 90 minutes without an interval.

In addition to By Special Arrangement, Friedman has won Oliviers for Ragtime and Sondheim’s Passion. She also won Best Actress in a Musical in the Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers’ Choice Awards for her last West End outing, in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White, which she also starred in on Broadway.

Friedman’s other musical credits Chicago, Lady in the Dark and Sunday in the Park with George and, reopening the Royal Festival Hall last year, Sweeney Todd, in which she played Mrs Lovett opposite Welsh tenor Bryn Terfel’s demon barber. She has also had three concert seasons at the Café Carlyle in New York.

– by Terri Paddock