Musical theatre leading lady Maria Friedman takes to the stage of the intimate Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark from March for a new solo show entitled Maria Friedman: Re-arranged.
Accompanied by an 11-piece band, the three-times Laurence Olivier Award-winning actress will perform newly arranged versions of songs from composers including Stephen Sondheim, Jacques Brel, Burt Bacharach, Jason Robert Brown, Andrew Lippa, George Gershwin, Kander and Ebb, Randy Newman, Michel Legrand and Stevie Wonder.
The new show has much to live up to – Friedman’s first solo show in London, By Special Arrangement at the Donmar Warehouse, won the Best Entertainment Laurence Olivier Award in 1995.
Friedman is one of Britain’s most enduring musical theatre actresses. Among her many London stage credits are Roxie in Chicago at the Adelphi, Ghetto, Sunday In The Park With George and Lady In The Dark at the National, and the role of Marian in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman In White at the Palace, a performance she recreated on Broadway. She has notched up a further two Laurence Olivier Awards, winning Best Actress in a Musical in 1997 for Passion at the Queen’s and again in 2004 for Ragtime at the Piccadilly, plus four more nominations. Friedman was last seen in London at the opening of the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall last summer, when she played Mrs Lovett in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.
Maria Friedman: Re-arranged runs at the Menier Chocolate Factory from 19 March to 4 May (press night 27 March).
Currently at the Southwark venue is camp comedy La Cage Aux Folles, which stars Douglas Hodge and Philip Quast as a gay couple who find themselves having to play host to their son’s puritanical in-laws. La Cage Aux Folles plays until 8 March.
CB