Logo

LONDON — Before jetting to Greece for a quick sailing holiday last week the British theater producer Sonia Friedman convened her staff for a meeting titled “Current and Productions in Development.” It could have been called “Enough Plays to Fill an Entire Broadway Season.”

Ms. Friedman, who has won the last two Tony Awards for best play revival (for “Boeing-Boeing” in 2008 and “The Norman Conquests” last month), is well known in the theater here and on Broadway for having a dizzying number of projects going at once, the recession be damned.

That morning’s agenda covered eight current shows — including her West End hits “La Cage aux Folles” and “Arcadia,” both possible transfers to Broadway — and 22 more in various stages. Among them: a theatrical version of the film “Shakespeare in Love,” which she is negotiating to develop with the producer Harvey Weinstein, and a production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” starring Kim Cattrall (Samantha of “Sex and the City”).

“We’re seeing the new photos for marketing ‘Prick Up Your Ears’ tomorrow, yeah?” she asked, a question that led to discussion, with the seven other women and three men in the room, about problems with e-mail spam filters that balk at the title of that play about Joe Orton.

“Should we just start writing ‘P.U.Y.E.’ instead?” Ms. Friedman said, adding to no one in particular, “How do you pronounce ‘P.U.Y.E.’ anyway?”

There was also attention to detail — arranging for flowers and Champagne for an understudy debut that night — as well as bad news to break, as she disclosed that Alan Ayckbourn’s “Norman Conquests” would not extend on Broadway as she had hoped, because of scheduling conflicts with the cast, and would not earn back its full investment. (It closes on July 26.)

If the economy has created challenges for producers everywhere, scuttling some plans and delaying others, Ms. Friedman seems to have both a sense and sensibility for taking the vagaries of show business in stride.

She laughs loud and is often self-deprecating. She appears unfazed by setbacks. (A recent, painful romantic breakup has clearly fortified her defense mechanisms.) If she often looks as if she has partied hard the night before, with her wild bed-head blond tresses and a slightly exhausted appearance, she seems, at 44, to have stamina to spare. One of the few young female producers working extensively in the West End and on Broadway, she also has a set of producing partners and investors who trust her instincts.

“Unlike a lot of producers Sonia’s not afraid to take a risk for great theater, even if it might not stack up on paper as an obvious commercial prospect,” said David Babani, artistic director of the Menier Chocolate Factory, a burgeoning theater company here that transferred “Sunday in the Park With George” to Broadway last year.

Mr. Babani cited Ms. Friedman’s Broadway productions last season of “Norman” and “The Seagull,” starring Kristin Scott Thomas, as two examples, noting that neither was a guaranteed hit; “Norman” was a slow ticket seller at first during its London run in 2008.

“People in London and in New York have come to trust her gut for quality straight plays that can build an audience in either city,” Mr. Babani said.

Ms. Friedman and Mr. Babani, who originally staged the current “La Cage” revival at the Chocolate Factory, are now hoping for a Broadway theater for “La Cage” in the spring. It is an intimate, scaled-down production, running on a relatively small stage at the Playhouse Theater here and could falter in a Broadway barn. “La Cage” was also on Broadway as recently as 2005, when it won the Tony for best musical revival, raising questions about whether New York theatergoers would have an appetite this soon for another “La Cage.”

“I think our ‘La Cage’ focuses on the human relationships in a way that Broadway audiences haven’t seen in past productions,” Ms. Friedman said. “But a transfer to Broadway needs to feel right before we do it.”

The youngest of four children in a family of performers and musicians — one of her sisters is the actress Maria Friedman (“The Woman in White” on Broadway) — Ms. Friedman said she fell in love with theater as a teenager while assisting Maria in a London production of “Oklahoma!”

“I was far more interested with what was going on backstage than in actually performing myself,” she said.

Ms. Friedman quit school at 16 and soon began working as a stage manager, at one point interviewing for a job with Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright in their kitchen. She took jobs at the National Theater before forming her own production company, Out of Joint, and then going to work for the Ambassadors Theater Group, which owns several theaters in London. Ambassadors now pays the overhead costs for her current company, Sonia Friedman Productions, which is just above the Ambassadors’ Duke of York’s Theater in the West End.