Harry Potter And the Cursed Child producer Sonia Friedman on huge expectations and absent fathers

Long before was first seen on stage there was much cloak (if not dagger) involved in the creative process.

The problems thrown up by turning the gargantuan success of the Harry Potter books into a stage show were not only about matching the magic seen in the films. That came later.

The first conundrum to solve was how to protect the creative team –which included J.K. Rowling, director John Tiffany and writer Jack Thorne – from the burden of expectation?

‘I remember that really well,’ says producer Sonia Friedman, behind such hits as Andrew Scott’s Hamlet, The Book Of Mormon and Jerusalem, starring a triumphant Mark Rylance.

‘We were very clear that we couldn’t carry that burden. I knew we would keel under the pressure. So we kept it very private. People didn’t know where we were rehearsing and so there was no press chasing us for stories. We just got on with the job.’

It was a job that Sonia became convinced was possible when she read the epilogue in the final book of the Harry Potter series, The Deathly Hallows.

‘It was seeing Harry as an adult when I realised there was this whole world beyond the book that could be explored.

‘It made it possible to mine the issues that Harry would have had as a parent, given that he was an orphan, [such as ] how can you be a good parent if you’ve never been parented?’

For Sonia there was a personal impulse to explore this part of Harry’s story. She saw in the wizard’s past something of her own experience as a child ‘and the lack of I had.’

The producer is the daughter of acclaimed violinist Leonard Friedman, who left Sonia’s mother before Sonia was born (her older sister is the acclaimed musical theatre actress and director Maria Friedman).

With the show’s creatives, Sonia ‘talked a lot about difficult, complicated, absent fathers and parents. And then we talked about the impact of that on a child like Albus.’

The producer is speaking from New York where she is opening the first production of the musical Funny Girl since Barbara Streisand starred in the 1964 premiere.

But she is also there to check out the New York production of Harry Potter And the Cursed Child, which has been turned from the two-part structure (with an interval in each) first seen in , into a one-parter.

‘It’s been carefully reworked, re-edited and reimagined. Because just cutting would have been really crude. We used the awful time of the pandemic in a creative way and to our amazement it works really, really well here in New York.’

The one-part format works so well in fact that the new structure has been extended to the other international productions in San Francisco, Melbourne and the soon-to-open shows in Toronto and Tokyo. Hamburg will stay as a two-parter as will London.

Surely, with a one-part version now established it raises the prospect of Harry Potter touring this country and many others. ‘Maybe!’ says Sonia. ‘But because of the magic, illusions and all the flying it’s technically a very complex show. But it is definitely on the list of things we want to tackle now that we’ve got it down to one part.’

And yet despite the international appetite for the show, the key to its success was Sonia’s clarity of vision. ‘There wasn’t ever a global plan,’ she says.

‘I know that sounds crazy for somebody who’s producing Harry Potter but we never intended to produce a commercial behemoth. If we did we wouldn’t have made a two-part play. We would have done a musical, that’s the normal route.’

Instead the objective was more subtle: to create a show that was ‘beautiful and full of integrity. And with deep soul and emotion rooted in the power of storytelling,’ says Sonia.

After that, all they had to do was add the most spectacular illusions ever seen on stage.