AUDRA MCDONALD NEWS, INTERVIEWS & UPDATES



News for 4/3/2007


For McDonald, the Music Never Stops

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer


Hyperactivity is an interesting excuse for Broadway greatness.

The motivating factor for enrollment in toddler tumbling classes? Probably. The reason little Stevie has to sit up here by the teacher's desk? Unfortunately. The selling point for a new class of generic pharmaceuticals? Oh, sure.

But a path to musical theater glory and the like?

Odd. But how else to explain the storied, eclectic career of Audra McDonald?

Study, for a moment, her agenda for the first quarter of 2007.

She ushered in the new year via a concert at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic. Then she jetted to California to perform in a month-long run of Kurt Weill's "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" with the Los Angeles Opera. (Verdict in the New Yorker: McDonald plays the role of a prostitute with "impeccable musicianship while exuding eyebrow-raising sexiness and sass.") She closed that show the Sunday before last, took a red-eye to New York and started rehearsals for a Broadway musical the next day.

The singer will take this weekend off, but only to travel here and set up shop at the Kennedy Center with her old friend and favorite grande dame diva, Barbara Cook.

"I am of the belief that life is to be lived," McDonald says on the phone from a temporary home in California. "I do sort of just go at things pretty gung-ho in terms of how busy I keep my schedule. And if it's not filled up with performance, it's filled up with other things in life -- I'm a wife and mom, too. . . . But I have a lot of energy, so it's just better for me to keep busy."

Since graduating from Juilliard in 1993, she has been busy nabbing four Tony Awards, including one in 2004 for her role in "A Raisin in the Sun." (You'll remember that Diddy -- then Sean Combs -- was also in that one.) There have been television acting stints and an Emmy nomination and the release of four solo albums, three of them for musical theater aficionados and her latest, "Build a Bridge," introducing new pieces by such songwriters as Elvis Costello and John Mayer.

Regardless of origin, McDonald says, for her the song is always about the story it tells.

"The person who starts the song should be changed. There should be some kind of arc, some sort of journey. Otherwise, why are you singing it?" she says. "These lyrics aren't chosen at random. Lyricists are very specific with the words and commas and phrases they choose. . . . I think attention should be paid to that as much as attention should be paid to the rhythm and the notes a composer has laid out."

In the Roundabout Theatre Company's April revival of the 1963 musical "110 in the Shade," for instance, her songs will tell the story of Lizzie, a woman convinced she is doomed to old-maid-dom, eventually finding "more than she ever could've dreamed or hoped for."

McDonald calls the show, her first Broadway musical in seven years, a "chestnut" she hopes people will rediscover and come to love, but she says it's really only during concerts like the one this weekend that she has the ability to create a personal rapport with fans.

"There's no fourth wall. You're talking to the audience and including them in the most obvious way," she says. "And it's you up there, even though you're doing different songs and you may inhabit a different character or emotional state for each song, it's still you up there -- which has its challenges but is also very freeing."

Cook and McDonald have performed together so many times, they have the routine down pat: start with a duet, sink into a couple of solo sets, then a duet, then more solos and so on. Cook, of course, will tend toward the old standards that made her famous in musicals such as "The Music Man" and "Oklahoma!" McDonald will give her fans what they expect, including numbers from more recent musicals, such as "Your Daddy's Son" from "Ragtime."

When the two women (who between them encompass the better part of a century of musical theater) sing together, it's usually "old-fashioned familiar songs" that might prompt a little audience participation.

"Barbara and I are of the same mind that a concert is to invite people in and really create a communion between performer and audience," McDonald says. Done right, she adds, everyone within earshot will have "a sort of singular experience."



News for 1/1/2007


PBS Broadcasts Audra McDonald's New York Philharmonic Concert Dec. 31

By Andrew Gans
Playbill.com


"Live From Lincoln Center," which recently broadcast Audra McDonald's American Songbook concert, televises the four-time Tony Award winner's New Year's Eve concert Dec. 31.

McDonald headlines the New York Philharmonic's annual New Year's Eve gala. The evening, titled "Audra McDonald Sings the Movies for New Year's Eve," will feature tunes from such films as "The Wizard of Oz," "A Star Is Born," "Cabin in the Sky," "A Little Night Music," "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "My Fair Lady." Tony Award winner Ted Sperling conducts the New York Philharmonic orchestra.

PBS stations will broadcast the event live at 8 PM ET; check local listings.

A four-time Tony Award winner for her work in A Raisin in the Sun, Master Class, Carousel and Ragtime, Audra McDonald was also seen on Broadway in Henry IV. The singer-actress made her solo Carnegie Hall concert debut in an evening of songs scored for big bands, performing several tunes from her Nonesuch CD "Happy Songs." McDonald's other solo recordings, "Way Back to Paradise" and "How Glory Goes," are also on the Nonesuch label. The acclaimed actress also co-starred in the NBC series "Mister Sterling” and was recently seen in the WB series "Bedford Diaries." McDonald also made her Houston Grand Opera with a double bill of Send (who are you? I love you) and La Voix Humaine.

McDonald will return to Broadway later this season in the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of 110 in the Shade.

Beverly Sills hosts "Live From Lincoln Center," which is now in its 31st broadcast season.



News for 9/27/2006


Choosing Songs That Sound a Lot Like Life

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The New York Times


“I don’t like boundaries, and I don’t like labels,” Audra McDonald said in a tone of mild exasperation. “People have said, ‘Are you trying to become Norah Jones?’ I’m not trying to cross over into any damn world. These are just songs that are beautiful and have great meaning.”

Ms. McDonald, a supremely gifted lyric soprano and actress whose musical career straddles Broadway and the classical concert stage, was reflecting on the pre-release reaction to her audacious new album, “Build a Bridge,” out this week on Nonesuch Records. Produced and arranged by Doug Petty, it carries her further into contemporary pop than she has ever ventured.

Leading off with the Elvis Costello-Burt Bacharach cri de coeur “God Give Me Strength,” the album includes songs by the likes of John Mayer (“My Stupid Mouth”), Nellie McKay (“I Wanna Get Married”), Neil Young (“My Heart,”), Laura Nyro (“To a Child” and “Tom Cat Goodbye”), and Randy Newman (“I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”).

Their juxtaposition with two songs by Adam Guettel and one by Ricky Ian Gordon (a collaboration with Jessica Molaskey) — theater composers who straddle the same worlds as Ms. McDonald — illustrates her conviction that wonderful songs are wonderful songs, whatever their origins.

Ms. McDonald has no buried pop history. Sitting in a Nonesuch conference room on recent drizzly afternoon, Ms. McDonald, a trim, self-possessed woman of 36 who exudes an eager, high-strung intelligence, admitted she never paid close attention to pop while growing up in Fresno, Calif. “My parents were listening to a lot of what at the time was pop music, when it was a different thing from what it is now,” she recalled. “There was lots of jazz playing in the house but also Blood, Sweat and Tears and Earth, Wind and Fire. My mom loved singers like Linda Ronstadt. But she also had Leontyne Price and Chopin going on. In the 80’s I might have tried to sing Whitney Houston’s ‘Saving All My Love For You’ at a high school talent show.”

In choosing the songs for the album, Ms. McDonald, a self-professed Judy-Barbra fan (as in Garland and Streisand) cited a blend of theatricality and personal identification as criteria.

“I wanted to make an album that wasn’t necessarily theater music but whose material spoke to me that way,” she said. “The songs I landed on felt like they had a story or a character I could get into and really explore.”

“God Give Me Strength,” introduced in the 1996 movie “Grace of My Heart,” was suggested by two people: Dan Lipton, a sometime accompanist, and her friend Diana Krall, who is married to Mr. Costello.

“What I loved about the song is that it’s the cry of someone who’s not just desperate but someone looking for an answer,” she explained. “It has different peaks and valleys of emotion that go from upset to vengeful to absolute loss, in which the only thing left is to cry out to God. It could be the discovery of an atheist who thinks, ‘Since I have nothing else, I might as well turn to this.’ ”

Ms. McDonald said she had never heard of the singer-songwriter John Mayer until her musical director, Ted Sperling, introduced her to “My Stupid Mouth” (from Mr. Mayer’s 2001 album “Room for Squares”).

“I completely identify with it, because my entire life I’ve had a very big mouth that says the wrong thing,” she said.

“Bein’ Green,” Joe Raposo’s popular “Sesame Street” song written for Kermit the Frog, reflected her sense of being an outsider as a black person growing up in a white neighborhood and attending a mostly white high school in Fresno, she said. Rufus Wainwright’s “Damned Ladies,” which offers hard-headed advice to Tosca, Violetta, Mimi and other tragic operatic heroines as they plummet toward doom, addresses Ms. McDonald’s passion for opera and her humorous awareness of herself as a “drama queen.”

But it is in the album’s two Laura Nyro songs, both introduced to her eight years ago by the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who was struck by their similar vocal qualities and ranges, that the lines between pop and art song completely evaporate. Until he pointed out the similarity, she hadn’t paid much attention to Ms. Nyro.

It was a single phrase, “an elf on speed” in “To a Child” (from the 1984 album “Mother’s Spiritual”) that determined Ms. McDonald to record the song.

“For a mother it couldn’t be described any better,” said Ms. McDonald, whose 5½-year-old daughter, now in kindergarten, keeps her “in the moment.”

“Every time I sing, she says: ‘Mommy, stop it. You’re doing it again,’ ” Ms. McDonald said and laughed. “She says my singing makes her ears cry.”

But it is her rendition of “Tom Cat Goodbye,” a howl of murderous fury by a character name Rosie Pearl to the faithless father of her children, that Ms. McDonald abandons decorum to scream and growl a blistering diatribe.

Asked if she has ever been emotionally devastated like that, Ms. McDonald replied, “Of course.”

“Most artists have,” she added. “Why do you think I get on stage? Tom Cat is a very specific person in my life, and I’m sure he knows who he is.”



News for 1/4/2005


A star's change of tune

Audra McDonald opens the Songbook

By CELIA McGEE


For someone who says she's more at home with tragedy than comedy, Audra McDonald certainly laughs a lot.

She laughs about the cello she and her husband, bassist Peter Donovan, just gave their 4-year-old daughter for Christmas, and how Zoe "knew right away to ask for a bow."

She giggles ruefully at the nickname Muffy, which the other students gave her "for being so bubbly" when she showed up at Juilliard in 1990 to study voice.

She's tickled that, having made history by winning Tonys for her first three Broadway roles, now, at 34, she's a celebrity because she acted opposite Sean (P. Diddy) Combs last spring in "Raisin in the Sun."

That made Tony No. 4, by the way.

And her soft beauty breaks into a saucy smile at the brightly colored cocktail dress she found for Thursday's opening of this season's American Songbook series, at Frederick P. Rose Hall overlooking Columbus Circle.

"I decided," she announces, "that for once I wasn't going to wear black."

But don't think the songs the soprano has selected for her Rose Hall debut are on the light side.

Though she smiles, again, at the thought that many people are "suspicious that I chose pop songs" rather than standard Broadway tunes, she says they are "some of heaviest and most challenging I know."

They're the sort of choices that have often been called courageous. "I'd call it stupidity," she says — and laughs. "Or maybe it's because I was raised on many different kind of music, and it's a rebellious response that comes from that."

In March, she will star with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris in a concert version of Steven Sondheim's "Passion."

"I play Clara," she says, "so I get to roll around on a bed with almost no clothes on and sing beautiful songs. But I also have to get up out of the bed, which means I've been going to the gym."

She will makes her opera debut next year with the Houston Opera in Poulenc's "La Voix Humaine."

For her three American Songbook shows, presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center, she's mixing work by the kind of contemporary stage composers she tends to champion — Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, Jane Kelly Williams — with songs by singer-songwriters she feels influenced them — Rufus Wainwright, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Laura Nyro and others.

"I'm doing the angriest Laura Nyro song, for instance," she says, "'Tom Cat Goodbye.' Her mother was an opera singer, and it's an aria, a completely actable piece."

McDonald occupies the unusual position of being as celebrated for her acting as for her singing. Two of her Tonys were for musical-theater roles, in "Carousel" and "Ragtime," two for dramatic parts — in "Master Class" and "Raisin."

But Juilliard's classical voice program, which she entered with a background in music and theater that had started in Fresno, Calif., dinner theater when she was 7, made no allowances for anything beyond stringent vocal exercises, traditional repertoire and music theory.

At Juilliard, "Muffy" experienced for the first time "an absolute lack of self-esteem" so profound, she suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized for a month.

"They've certainly improved the program, and made it more well-rounded since I left, she says. "And it wasn't necessarily Juilliard's fault." She was away from her close-knit family — her father, a high-school principal, her college-administrator mother and her sister, now a writer on Fox's "The American Dad."

"In this profession, you're always dealing with anxiety," McDonald says. "There are no guarantees, and the more successful you are or are perceived to be, the harder it is to live up to that. Yes, I'm still a very anxious person — I'm the mother of a 4-year-old, so I'm tired and anxious."

But she's laughing again — at the fact that by granting Zoe her wish of "being a ballerina," she and her husband get up at 6:30 every Saturday morning to drive her to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater school.

The world her daughter is dancing through is both near and far from where McDonald grew up.

"My parents were always telling us, 'being that you're black, you have to be better at everything than anyone white.'"

Now, she says, a new generation seems possessed of "greater diversity — the knowledge that 'ballerinas' come in all shapes and colors and races and creeds."

But one thing hasn't changed.

"I'm going to be one of those mothers who needs a Valium to get through my daughter's performance — every time I watch her, I cry."

Then, she laughs.



News for 5/24/2004


The following interview appeared in the May 2004 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine





News for 1/3/2004


The following article appeared in New York Magazine





News for 7/12/2003


LuPone and McDonald 'Passion' Finds Its Giorgio


Andrew Gans
Playbill On-Line

The upcoming concert version of Stephen Sondheim's Passion - starring Patti LuPone as Fosca and Audra McDonald as Clara - has found its male lead.

Michael Cerveris- who recently portrayed Ken in the Signature Theater's revival of Fifth of July - will star as Giorgio in the Tony-winning musical, which plays the festival Aug. 22 and 23. Cerveris played the role of the torn lover last year opposite Rebecca Luker and Judy Kuhn for the Kennedy Center's mounting of the musical during its summer-long Sondheim Celebration. Urban Cowboy's Lonny Price, who directed both LuPone and McDonald in the Lincoln Center Sweeney Todd concert, will direct here as well.

Based on Ettore Scola's Italian film "Passion d'Amore," Passion opened on Broadway on May 9, 1994, with a cast that featured Jere Shea (Giorgio), Marin Mazzie (Clara) and Donna Murphy (Fosca). The tale of obsessive love includes such Sondheim tunes as "Happiness," "I Read," "I Wish I Could Forget You," "Loving You" and "No One Has Ever Loved Me." The original Broadway production received the 1994 Tony Award for Best Musical; Donna Murphy also garnered her first Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, and Sondheim and Lapine were awarded prizes for, respectively, Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical.

Michael Cerveris received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in the title role of The Who's Tommy, a part he also played for two years in Germany. Cerveris originated the role of architect Thomas Andrews in the Tony-winning musical Titanic and also appeared onstage in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Total Eclipse, Abingdon Square and Life Is a Dream.



News for 4/4/2003


Audra McDonald Sings New Guettel Work at Carnegie Hall in 2004


Audra McDonald will be a part of the inaugural season of the new space at Carnegie Hall, the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall.

McDonald will sing a new work by composer Adam Guettel, which is being commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation through 'the generosity of John L. Tishman.' The six evenings of concerts will mark the world premiere of the Guettel composition, which does not yet have a title; concerts are scheduled for June 2, 4, 8, 10 and 12, 2004 at 8:30 PM and June 6 at 5 PM. Ted Sperling will serve as musical director and conductor.

A three-time Tony Award winner for her work in Master Class, Carousel and Ragtime, Audra McDonald was most recently on Broadway in the title role of Marie Christine. The singer-actress recently made her solo Carnegie Hall concert debut in an evening of songs scored for big bands, performing several tunes from her Nonesuch CD "Happy Songs." McDonald's other solo recordings, "Way Back to Paradise" and "How Glory Goes," are also on the Nonesuch label. She also co-stars in the new NBC series, "Mister Sterling.'

Adam Guettel, grandson of famed Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, has been hailed by The New York Times as 'a young composer of strength and sophistication.' His works include Floyd Collins and Saturn Returns, and his latest musical, The Light in the Piazza, is a fairy-tale romance about the love affair of an American woman - who is not all that she seems - with an Italian man in Florence. Piazza will premiere at Seattle's Intiman Theatre May 31-July 19.

Tickets for the McDonald concerts are priced at $48 or $62, and the Zankel Hall entrance and lobby are located on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets. For more information, call (212) 247-7800 or visit www.carnegiehall.org.



News for 3/15/2003


Audra Sings "Happy Songs" in Prince Music Theater Benefit in Philly

By Kenneth Jones


Audra McDonald will sing the blues - and sing happy, too - and more in a benefit concert for Prince Music Theater, the Philadelphia company devoted to new and classic musicals, 7:30 PM March 30.

The Tony Award-winning soprano's work will be sweetened by a four-piece band that includes husband Peter Donovan on bass and Prince artistic director Ted Sperling on piano.

Front orchestra tickets are $75 and include a post performance reception with McDonald. Rear orchestra tickets are $50. Proceeds go to Prince Music Theater's programs to support new work.

Expect tunes from McDonald's latest album, "Happy Songs," representing the Gershwins, Harold Arlen and other classic American pop writers. The actress-singer won Tony Awards for Broadway's Carousel, Master Class and Ragtime. Recently, she's expanded her career to include the TV film, "Wit," and the NBC series, "Mister Sterling."

Prince Music Theater is at Chestnut at Broad Street in Philadelphia. For ticket information, call (215) 569-9700 or visit Prince Music Theater.



News for 1/12/2003


Interview from the January 11-17, 2003 issue of Tv Guide





Audra McDonald is 'bustin' out all over'


Interview with Audra McDonald

By Benjamin Ivry
Special to The Christian Science Monitor


Tony-winning actress and soprano Audra McDonald has the kind of talent that can't be pigeon-holed.

She has been honored for Broadway roles in such plays as "Ragtime" (1998) and "Carousel" (1994) and has starred in TV movies like "Annie" and "Wit," and appeared on series like "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

The Fresno, Calif., native is now touring nationwide and has a new CD, "Happy Songs." She debuted recently with a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall and travels to Los Angeles this weekend. McDonald also will take on a dramatic new role in a new TV series, "Mister Sterling," in which she plays a senator's chief of staff.

Whether she's performing in a TV drama or a staged opera her goals are similar. "The most important thing for me as an actress ... is to be fearless and to challenge myself," McDonald says. "Acting in TV and film forces me outside of my comfort zone, which is why I jumped at the chance to be in 'Mister Sterling.' "

At least one of her many fans is concerned about her segue into prime-time TV.

"She can be an excellent actress, but she seems to find her way to real emotion most successfully through passionate music and intelligent lyrics," says novelist and Broadway musical aficionado Jesse Green. "It's hard to believe she'll get the equivalent on a weekly show. Also, what animates her style is something rather quirky ... underneath the perfect veneer of her voice. Television drama doesn't usually do justice to such types."

Still, Green adds that McDonald has "acquitted herself well in every unlikely adventure she's taken on. Just when it seems that, this time, she's not going to pull it off, she does."

McDonald got her start in Fresno, performing in dinner theaters as a young girl.

"My earliest idols were Barbra Streisand, Patti LuPone, and Lena Horne," she says. "While at Juilliard, I was constantly torn between a classical career and a career on Broadway. I am still tempted by many classical works."

Heartily agreeing with her taste for varied fare is the rising star conductor Marin Alsop, who recently led a concert with McDonald as soloist.

"Audra is one of those rare artists that defies categorizing," Mr. Alsop says. "She has earned her well-deserved reputation based on her work on Broadway and in popular song, but she is equally gifted in classical repertoire and moves easily among all styles of music. She has a passionate curiosity for all styles of music and drama."

Some of her biggest fans demand more musical theater. "I want her to star in a revival of 'My Fair Lady' or 'Funny Girl,'" says Green. "A smart director could use the nontraditional casting effectively. As far as recording ... I'd like to hear her do more [Leonard] Bernstein."

Indeed, McDonald says she has a weakness for Bernstein's music, saying that the late composer was "someone who bridged the genres of classical and Broadway with ease, because he lived in both worlds. Being a genius didn't hurt either. I, too, fall in between both of those worlds, so I ... feel very comfortable singing his music."

Recently even McDonald's formidable gifts were not enough to carry an overly tragic "Marie Christine," (a musical retelling of Medea) by Michael John La Chiusa.

Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, says that McDonald "did a gallant job in 'Marie Christine,' which turned out to be too glum for the paying audiences. I hope younger composers like La Chiusa hang in there and create more works."

Green agrees that McDonald "above all needs to keep working with living composers ... otherwise we will have, in 20 years, only the same repertoire we have today."

McDonald herself seems to find no shortage of future projects, with plans to perform music by new composers Adam Guettel (Richard Rodgers's grandson) and classics by Kurt Weill, whose theater piece "Seven Deadly Sins" she recently performed with conductor John Mauceri.