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The thing is,” says Maria Friedman, “you carry it all with you. I am five years old, I’m 15, I’m 20, I’m 30. I am all those ages.” In a very real sense, the actor, director, and theatre stalwart is in fact 66 – though can currently be seen on stage playing a 16-year-old girl in the award-winning musical Kimberly Akimbo. “I think actors, particularly… that’s our equipment. It’s what we use,” Friedman tells me. “I don’t come with a laptop. I don’t come with a violin. I come with my life.”
We’re speaking over Zoom, with Friedman a few days into her run playing age-bent teen Kimberly Levaco at London’s Hampstead Theatre. In the play – a wry and lively modern musical – her character lives with a rare genetic condition that accelerates many signs of aging. To all intents and purposes, she’s a child trapped in the body of an older woman, staring down the barrel of a tragically short life expectancy. Friedman is, she says, “loving every second of it”.
When Kimberly Akimbo was staged on Broadway back in 2022, it was a runaway success, winning five Tony awards, including Best Musical. Signing on to the UK production was, says Friedman, a no-brainer. “There aren’t that many parts for women of my age, so when one comes along that’s like that, you don’t want to miss it,” she says. “It’s lovely to be the custodian of a story that seems very important these days, about kindness and living in the now... it’s what we always strive for, isn’t it, to be present? And Kimberly, because of whatever condition she has, has a real understanding of time, and that she has little of it.”
To many in the UK outside of the theatre world, Friedman may be best known as a face on EastEnders, having prowled Albert Square as the brassy, scene-stealing Elaine Peacock between 2013 and 2017. In musical theatre spheres, though, she’s an iron-clad veteran. Back in 1990, she played Dot/Marie in the first UK production of Stephen Sondheim’s hallowed musical Sunday in the Park with George. (To those unfamiliar, it’s a star role – the one Ariana Grande was recently set to take on at the Barbican next year, before dropping out.)
It’s one of a number of Sondheim roles she’s tackled onstage, to no small amount of acclaim; in recent years, she’s also turned director, masterminding (among other things) the awards-lavished 2024 revival of Merrily We Roll Along that became the highest-grossing Broadway production of any Sondheim musical.
“In America,” says Friedman, “the whole vibe of being an actor in musical theatre is taken in an entirely different way. In this country, musical theatre is the poor cousin of the ‘great play’. It’s not respected enough in this country, full stop. Over there, a musical theatre artist is celebrated.
“You don’t go to Manhattan to see Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament. You go there to see Broadway. If you’ve got a Tony Award on Broadway, people will stop. People in the elevator stop. The person in the deli stops. It matters. Over here, [people are only interested] if you work with anybody famous.”
Friedman has worked with some bona fide stars herself; on Merrily, she cast Daniel Radcliffe alongside Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, with both Radcliffe and Groff winning Tonys for their efforts. But Radcliffe’s Potter stardom was almost immaterial. “It’s not cynical,” she says. “It’s not stunt casting. If you write down on a piece of paper everything [Radcliffe’s character] Charlie is – brilliant, anxious, clever, funny, loyal, all these things – you get Daniel.”
Friedman was close with Sondheim – the late composer, who died in 2021, was godfather to her son Toby. (His father was the actor and director Jeremy Sams; Friedman has another son, Alfred, with cameraman Oleg Poupko.) “He was constantly curious,” she recalls. “He was an exacting friend. He expected you to be as specific as he is, with conversation. And I think he had a radar for insincerity. He could smell genuine people, and if you looked at his very few deep, loyal friends, we all have that in common. He was demanding in the best way possible: you had to show up with Steve.”
You could make the argument that Sondheim – monolithically revered during his own lifetime – has never been more popular: the record-breaking Merrily is one of many high-profile revivals of his work to be mounted in the past few years. And it’s not just a Broadway trend, either: the recent lavish revival of Into the Woods transfers to the Noël Coward Theatre this month; West Side Story is coming to the National Theatre next year; Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s excellent re-staging of Sweeney Todd this summer broke attendance records for the venue. There is, says Friedman, no mystery around this appetite.
“It’s him in particular. He’s a genius. He’s the Shakespeare [of musical theatre],” she says, with the axiomatic tone of someone observing that water is wet. “It’s going to go on forever, because his ideas are universal.”
It’s high praise, then, when she says that Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, the writers of Kimberly Akimbo, are “in the same tradition. “And I hope they get the posterity in their own time that [Sondheim] discovered. I think they will. They’re beavering away, and have things to say.
“I think art is held in a very, very firm, brilliant way by people like Stephen Sondheim, and Janine and David,” Friedman adds. “They write things that bloody matter.”
‘Kimberly Akimbo’ is at Hampstead Theatre, London, until 7 November
