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Interviews
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"You Can't Do Everything" Sandra Giorgetti and Maria Friedman talk at the Menier Theatre where Maria Friedman: Re-Arranged is playing until 4th May. In 2005 shortly before the Broadway opening of Woman in White Maria Friedman was diagnosed as having Stage 1 breast cancer. With courage and determination verging on the heroic, she underwent immediate surgical treatment and, bruised and bandaged, went on to play a victorious opening night. She endured a further treatment of fiercely debilitating drugs which continued through the run and after the show closed. Her decision to give up her musical theatre career is linked directly to her illness. "It just pulled me up short. You can't do everything. I was trying to be, you know, a parent to two absolutely wonderful, energetic boys and I didn't have any quality time for any of it. I would get to work when most people are going to bed, but I'd already been up since quarter to seven." Having now redefined herself exclusively as a concert performer, Maria Friedman is having "a hugely good time" doing a one woman show accompanied by an eleven piece band (a bigger troupe than you'll find in most West End shows); "I am loving it and I would be stupid not to with this group. And it's funny every night because they're naughty. If I have to leave my two little babies and not put them to bed, I've got to first and foremost have a laugh - number one is to giggle as much as possible. "Number two is to be stretched intellectually, emotionally - stretched." The selection of songs in the programme meet both the criteria, ranging from Stephen Sondheim to Suzanne Vega via Jaques Brel and Randy Newman - but how was the selection of old favourites and new pieces picked when the show is deliberately not themed? "When you've got repertoire there - and you haven't sung them for fourteen years it's a real treat to go back to them and they feel like they are old friends; it's just a joy for me to go back to some of those", but reminiscence is balanced by a strong sense of a realist at work: "there's a financial restriction if you are having 20-something new songs arranged for an 11 piece band for a 130-seat theatre, you know people never understand the pragmatics of putting on a show". "I don't listen to music at all so every single thing comes from somebody else but I obviously have to make a connection to it. I have a group of people and I really trust their opinion, their musical taste, they're always moving on. I don't listen to music so I don't move on. I'm just completely stuck in my little world." A 'little world' it might be but it's one in which practicality has a big place: "Music has always been a thing of work to me, and self expression, and how I pay my bills and that's the way it is for a professional musical household; there is nothing kind of romantic about it." The art of making passion …One 'old friend', Sondheim's "Finishing the Hat", has been given a re-working. "I love newness. The Sunday in the Park with George (piece) was because I had a very clear new thought about how to take the old material and make it into a narrative which is a different take - this is about Dot living with an artist". Approaching Sunday from a different perspective is not a solitary new thought; the piece is part of a two-hour show, as yet unseen in the UK, which comprises a series of "mini musicals" created from Sondheim's cannon, including a 14 minute setting from Passion which Ms Friedman describes as "a huge, long piece of exquisite music". "I've done it all over the world, so it's bound to arrive here soon." When she performed the show in Barcelona an overwhelmed audience let show its joy with a lengthy standing ovation to which Ms Friedman asked, "You're not English, are you?" And it's certainly true that a concert-going culture does not exist here in the same way: "First of all we don't have the spaces," starts the explanation. "We really don't have the right kind of atmospheres in terms of the actual buildings; but I think more than that, we don't have that kind of attachment to the chanteuse - those people who [just] stood up, no set, no costume, we are much more banal than that. Cabaret is associated with kind of cruise shipping and gin-soaked women doing tributes to a composer - it just doesn't have the right kind of feeling of seriousness. "It's raw, it's uncomfortable. I am so unashamed of emotion; I like it, I want it, I need it in my work. I like to make people laugh more than I like to make them cry but I need to do both… contact the real bit of humanity that I love absolutely, the real pulse, the real heart, not the claptrap, not the glamour." And this combination of untrammelled sincerity and depth of emotion could be the key to her interpretive mastery. "I am always me. I am never being anybody else." When it comes to approaching a role like Fosca, wretchedly ugly and tormented, so apparently unlike Friedman herself, it comes down to identifying parallels: "This is how I start off with the role: I am not dying. I've not got consumption. I'm not someone that people scream at when I walk through the door, but I am somebody who is aware of a life source and wants to live. "I look for the connection." Openly, almost pragmatically bluntly (there's that word again), she counts off the connections: "Fosca wants to live, Fosca knows how to love, tries to love, she thinks just like me. That's where I start from. I've also been rejected in love, there's another thing. I've also learnt to love better, there's another thing. I've also loved obsessively, there's another thing. I've also felt that I've taught someone how to love, there's another thing. There they all are, that's me… "It goes on and on and on and on and, where the difference is, is where you make a connection to what it might be if you were that, but I feel ugly sometimes, don't you? I feel unlovable sometimes. There is nothing in Fosca apart from the physical appearance which is not like something I've been through …" With the interjection that Fosca is one of her favourites, the conversation seems to have come round full circle - well, may be more of an oblong. "It's one of my favourites. I've got twenty thousand favourites. Where do you start? There's a huge balance when you are doing 22 songs ... and you don't hardly ever get it right. May be I haven't got it right - what can you do? - I'm just singing a few songs from the bottom of my heart, and I can't do more." "Maria Friedman: Re-arranged" runs at the Menier Theatre, London, until May 4th with performances Tuesday to Saturday at 8pm and a Sunday matinee at 3.30pm (note: no Saturday matinee performance). It was reviewed by Sandra Giorgetti.
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