Insights from Audra McDonald Interview

She walked away with her first three Tony Awards for her first three Broadway shows, Carousel, Masterclass, and Ragtime, then won her fourth Tony by not singing in A Raisin in the Sun. Welcome to Women in Theater. I'm Linda Weiner, theater critic of Newsday, and our guest today is the wildly gifted Audra McDonald. If this generation still has a hunger for Broadway royalty, and why should it not, she is the real thing. No boundaries? No boundaries. Cabaret, blues, Carnegie Hall, opera. It's just all the same? Well, I think it's more about just I have an insatiable curiosity, you know, and I... am always very curious while I'm working on something, you know, well, what about if I turn to this next? I guess maybe that means I've got, you know, a mind that doesn't stay focused for very long or maybe it's just that I want to make sure that I've explored all that there is to explore about Sort of my artistic impulses, you know, and one doesn't have a lot of time on the planet, so I'm just trying to get it all in, I guess. That's kind of a horrifying thought. I guess you don't do fluff. No, I don't. That's a weakness, you know. We've got to say, where's the fluff? No, and maybe that just comes from my personality, but I don't. For me, if I'm not emotionally committed and artistically fulfilled by the material, I do a terrible job. I cannot fully bring myself to that project. So for me, it has to truly engage me for me to be involved. Otherwise, I'm terrible. Okay, what is Roger Rokossov's Rocka's Music Hall. Close. Roger Rocka's. Rocka. Roger Rocka. This is a music hall in Fresno, California. Where you grew up. Where I grew up. You were born in Berlin. Born in Berlin. My dad was in the Army, and then we moved to Fresno. And this was a dinner theater. And the resident theatrical company there was called the Good Company Players. And they still are in existence, and they do ten musicals a year. and they had a little junior company group that would perform before each musical. They would do a cabaret every night before each musical. So I started with them when I was nine years old, and I left them when I was 17. And you did everything. I did everything there. I mean, it really was the basis for my theatrical training. I also went to performing arts junior high and high school, but the basis for my theatrical training was being on stage every single night, basically from the time I was nine until the time I was 17, with certain breaks here and there. You know, there's no better training. training. Ava Peron at 16? Yes. Is there a tape? What I would give to see. There is a tape actually. You know it's funny I was double cast with another girl who was let's see she was about five years older than I was and you know Fresno at that time was not the most cultural places to be so people would call into the box office and say is the white or the black one on tonight? Which ended up, I mean so was it was actually a big deal that I they cast me in the role was a big deal that they cast the one so young and it was a huge deal that they cast a black girl in it so that was sort of my first taste of sort of non-traditional casting and sort of the the fury or you know just the drama that surrounds something like that but for me it was just that I wanted to do the role. you know? That's all. There were some people who thought that it was odd that there was a black woman as Carrie. Your first Broadway musical, Carousel, directed by Nicholas Heitner, absolutely gorgeous production. Yes, it was incredible. And there you were supposedly doing the, you know, the second lead, the fluffy girl. which you did not make into a fluffy girl, really, Carrie. Well, Nick Heitner wouldn't allow that. You know, he did not approach that piece as, you know, a fluffy piece, which so many people can do because they think, oh, there's all these wonderful melodies, and it's Rodgers and Hammerstein, and it's Carousel, but, you know, let's look at the facts here. This is, you know, first of all, it's premarital sex. Then when they finally do get married, he's a wife-beater, and then he's a robber, and then, you know, I mean, there's lots of really deep, dark issues going on in this play, this musical. And Nick was like... Let's just go in and really look at them and really play them for what they are, you know? And was there any issue about you and Mr. Snow? I'm sure some people had issues with it, but no one that I was close to, and certainly no one in the production to us, you know, because if you looked at that production, the wondrous Shirley Verrett, the incredible opera singer, played Julie's cousin, Cousin Nettie. You know, so we weren't looking at race in that. We were looking at the story. the human aspects of this story and race had nothing to do with it. You know, you are famous for Here I Am, Mr. Snow. You know this? Here I am, Mr. Snow. You were actually sort of on your back on a kitchen table, right? Yes. Nick had me sort of, well, Mr. Snow, here I am, basically throw myself into what I would assume, what Carrie assumed her wedding night position would be, to put it. daintily or not so daintily. And the other, actually, that comes from a very organic and real place because these are lusty, stinky working girls who work in these mills all day. They have not much money. Most of them have left their families to go work in this mill and live in this mill town. So there is this part of them that exists. So Nick was just like, let's go with it and enjoy the fact that, you know, that's who they are. They're not prim and proper, you know. Highfalutin girls, these are lusty working women. Now when you went to Juilliard, you didn't study acting. You studied opera? Yes, I studied classical voice at Juilliard. That was difficult for me. I've made it no secret. It was a very difficult time for me at Juilliard. Mainly because when I moved to New York to go to Juilliard, I expected that I would be able to sing my Broadway stuff, and that's not what the program offered, and I just wasn't ready for what the program offered me. Looking back on it, it was an incredible education. and it helped me to find my operatic voice, or better to say, it helped me to find all of my voice. Up until that time, I hadn't been using all that was there. How high does it go? Oh, it doesn't. I mean, no Mariah Carey or anything like that, but, you know, I have like... You have a huge range. Yes, it's like a high E down to... I don't know, like a G below middle C. That might not mean much to a lot of people. But, and no breaks in between. That's what's really, it just really, it's one voice. Well, that's what I've always strived to have. And I have a wonderful teacher who I still go to on a regular basis. And when I'm really working on a role or a part, I just did a John Adams premiere at the New York Philharmonic last May, which was an 11-minute aria, which, you know, had... you know, high C's and low A's all in the same passage, you know, on words like war and, you know, fire or whatever. So I was with my voice teacher every single day. It's like training for the Olympics, basically. I feel like you never stop learning. So there you were with this opera background and you wanted to be on Broadway. And then Terence McNally was nice enough to write a play about Maria Callas so you could come in and play a student singing Lady Macbeth. Yes, yes. That must have been a gift. You know, and I didn't even see it coming. I got a call saying that, you know, this was... this show was happening and would I be interested in auditioning for it? And I said, oh, okay, yes, yes, yes. And they said, well, here's the aria you have to sing. And I was still doing Carousel at the time, and I walked into Shirley Barrett's room, and I said, hey, Shirley, didn't you sing Lady Macbeth? Well, here's the aria I have to sing. And she looked at it, and she said, ooh, honey. She said, you better have a couple real strong high Cs. And I thought, oh, dear. And so I studied it and got it ready, and then on the day of the audition, I canceled. I thought, I can't do this. And I said, never mind, I'm not going in. And then they called about two weeks later and said, we still haven't found anybody. Please reconsider coming in. So, I mean, I was running away from this gift, I mean, in more ways than one that was just basically being handed to me on a silver platter. What a gift it turned out to be. out to be, to portray that role opposite that hurricane that is Zoe Caldwell, who has since become a major part of my life. Your daughter's named Zoe. Named for Zoe, right, yes. She's named for Zoe Caldwell. well. Seeing the two of them together is incredible. Was she three now? She's almost four. She'll be four. Yes, she'll be four on Valentine's Day. And you can do this? You know, have a Broadway career and a classical career? And a baby? And a baby and a husband in the field? Yes, it's very, very, it's very difficult because Your hours are so different and they're never the same. There's no consistency. And consistency is something I think that is very important for children. So there's a lot of running around with Zoe. A lot of, you know, we have many pictures of Zoe at many theaters. Zoe was at the theater every single Sunday when I was doing Henry IV. She's getting used to the life, which is good, but it scares me and my husband a little bit because we don't want her to become a performer. We want her to be a doctor. Oh, maybe she'll rebel. I hope so. I hope she rebels. Your parents are... Are? Are. Are. Your father is musically trained, although a principal in high school. And your mother is a pianist, but runs the Affirmative Action? She's director of human resources at Vermont, University of Vermont. Oh, it's Vermont now, not California. She was with California for years, and now she's at Vermont. And my dad is now associate superintendent. So they're very heavy in the education. So they clearly didn't say, we don't want our brilliant little girl to go on the nasty stage. No, they said you may pursue that, but the only way you're going to New York is if you go to school. And you may pursue that, but you will get a... some sort of higher education degree because if you fall you know fall back on fall back on you can always teach yeah like there's always work at the post office cook I didn't learn that either did you graduate from Juilliard I know you took a mental sabbatical yes I did you go back yes I did I did graduate Took me a little longer than most of the kids in my class, but I did graduate. I have since gone back and done many benefits for Juilliard, so I think we've paid each other back. I mean, I certainly put everybody through a lot of hell while I was there. But, yes, so when I went back to complete the one year I had missed. That's when I met my husband, so it was worth it. Your husband, whose name is? Peter Donovan, and he's a bass player. He's a bass player, yes. And he works in Broadway? Yes, Broadway. He does Broadway shows. He does, he plays for... American Symphony Orchestra, he is subbed with the New York Philharmonic and now, as I was saying to you before we started rolling, Barbara Cook stole him from me. He's now the bass player for Barbara Cook. Oh, really? But that's okay. I said, honey, it's okay. That's a great soprano. You can go to her. that you'll share. Yes, Barbara knows that I share. That's so sweet. There was a break after Marie Christine, and then you people, you know, we could have assumed that the disappointment of Marie Christine, which is really the one thing that sort of didn't work out. We can talk about that. And you sort of disappeared for a while, but you were out making a baby. Well, I was having a baby. I was still doing a lot of concerts. I was recording my second album. I just wasn't on the Broadway stage at that point, and so a lot of people thought I just sort of disappeared. She's not in front of me, therefore she must be crying. Yes, I must be crying somewhere. She's in her room crying. Which I mean from my pregnancy too and I was also that time off I was also filming wit with Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson so I was actually very very busy and then I had some complications with my pregnancy that put me on bed rest at five and a half months pregnant and I had to stay in bed until two weeks before the baby was born. You can't sit still. No and it was terrible. My poor husband, my poor dog. That's all I have to say but they got me through it. Yeah, someone wrote something wonderful about, I think, You know, one of those sentences I wish I had written, that you're like a party favor about to pop. And I would think putting this woman in bed for months would be... It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And it was so difficult that I don't really remember it now. It's something that I think I've sort of wiped out of my mind. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. You know, I mean, it was necessary to make sure that my baby didn't come early and that she was healthy, so it was absolutely the right thing to do. But... But to stay still all that time and just sort of ponder, you know, whether this baby was going to be okay for three and a half months was terrible. Could you sing? I mean, can you vocalize and stuff? Well, they asked me not to because the contractions were bad. And so anything that was going to irritate that area was not good. So I just watched a lot of the Learning Channel network. I was on the computer a lot. I ate. I was a very big girl when I gave birth. I gained like 75 pounds. And then once the baby was born, I haven't slept since. So I should have looked at it as a blessing because I have since not had one full night of sleep. I had been thinking before, well, here is at least one real stage creature who hasn't gone Hollywood and decided what she needs is an annuity and besides they write such interesting scripts there now. You did? Mr. Sterling? Yes, well, I did Mr. Sterling. Because that was a script and a show that I really believed in. And even though the network wasn't behind us... This was NBC? It was NBC. ABC, I'm sorry. It was NBC. It was Josh Brolin, myself, William Russell, and David Neronia. And we had an incredible time with that show, and we really believed in the message about this guy who was not owned by anybody. A senator. A senator. Someone who's appointed a senator after another senator dies. but basically was not owned by anybody, coming in to shake up Washington politics. And what I liked about it with my character is that she was so high up in his administration. Chief of staff. She was his chief of staff. She was his confidant. She became like his best friend. And there was a real wonderful sort of energy between the two of us there. And a lot of people would write and say, well, when are Jackie and Mr. Sterling going to get together? Whatever. And, of course, the network's like, that can't happen. He's black, he's white, it can never happen, you know. Still, still. But I love that the audiences that were interested in our show were wanting that and were so engaged by the fantasy that someone could go and actually shake up Washington in that way. Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Did you like doing a different script every week? I did. The one thing I didn't like about it was the hours. I thought Broadway was hard, you know. There was nothing like a 16-hour day on a set. And basically doing a one-hour drama is filming. A little movie every 10 days. So you never really get to settle into your character. And by the time you get all those lines down, it's all changed and it's all different, you know. So it was killed after? We had 10 episodes. 10 episodes. Yeah. So, you know, for me it was a great experience. It renovated my house. The money was good. You live in Westchester? I live in Westchester, yeah. We just moved there about two years ago. But the experience was invaluable. And if I go back to television or something like that, I mean, I've had a few offers and I've been close for a couple of things, but it really has to be the right role. I refuse to do sort of stereotypical in the box. I certainly don't do that in my life in theater and in music, and I'll be damned if I'm going to do that in Hollywood. So if it means that I don't have a relationship with Hollywood, that's fine. You certainly don't do the stereotypical. Even when I saw you in Raisin in the Sun, and there you were. I've seen you in nontraditional casting for so long. I know. I finally was actually playing some of my type. Playing this black woman in this black family with... Sean Combs. Right, right. And what was that like? That was an incredible experience. Felicia, Rashad, and I fought it. We didn't want to do it. Yeah. We were like, Raisin in the Sun, come on. I mean, everybody does Raisin in the Sun. You know, it's just the mama on the couch. You know, we had very sort of close-minded ideas about it. And then... When Sean got cast, we really got concerned. We didn't understand. Can he do this? And it wasn't until Felicia and I sat down and had a meeting with Sean and the director, and we saw how passionate they were about it. I went and read the script again. I remember actually even my... my mother-in-law at my house one night picking up the script and reading it and the next morning saying, that's powerful. It really is. And I think it was by the time I got to Ruth's big explosion when she finds out that they're going to move that I thought, I am a fool. have to do this. I have to do this. And the care that was taken with that production and making sure that it was really serving Lorraine Hansberry's writing, that we didn't do anything that was a cliche, that Sean worked his tail off. I can probably tell this story about Sean now that it's all over. Sean had the entire set built in his apartment. Oh my God. So he'd come home. For anybody who doesn't know Sean Combs. Holmes is also P. Diddy and Hoff Diddy. Yes, everybody knows who he is. Okay, now we're done. Okay, go ahead. But this man had the set built in his apartment so that when we would finish rehearsal, after six hours, eight hours of rehearsal, he'd go home with his coach and rehearse all night long. The man was tireless. And then to bring in the audiences that we brought in. And these people would be loud before the show started and diddy for a couple minutes. into it. And then by the end of the show they were quiet as a mouse, they were they were standing and applauding, they were crying, and this was an introduction to theater for them. So for me the whole experience, once again me running from this experience, it turned out to be. You know life-altering for me, and it was the hardest character I've ever played maybe it's because there were so many things about her that were too close to me that I had a hard time Finding you know you know Ruby Dee when we interviewed here didn't want to play Ruth I'm sure she wanted to play beneath the right either. Yeah, I'm tired I'm here to be the one who's doing the ironing, the long-suffering wife. Come on, I want to be... Ruby Dee came backstage and she looked at me and she said, poor Ruth, stuck behind the ironing board of life. Which is true. But there's a lot of wonderful stuff about Ruth. She has, I think, the best sort of rebirth. Really, it was beautiful, really wonderful. Wonderfully sad play. Yes, and you know, I couldn't have done it any longer. It was one of those things that it was a wonderful experience, but I couldn't live that life. any longer than I did on stage because it took a lot out of me. You have a missionary zeal about a lot of things, but particularly useful is about new musical theater. And when you made your first record, first record, your solo, you could have done anything and sold anything. And instead, you chose all the leading new composer lyricists and interpreted them in a way that I think... The value is incalculable. Anyway, it's so valuable because people then would come to hear you and then end up hearing these songs. No, that was very important to me and I didn't think of it as a huge deal. I mean, I thought of it as, this is what I want to do. I've been singing a lot of their stuff anyway in different workshops and readings and concerts and I thought that my record producer agreed with me, what a great idea to throw them all together on a disc and I just didn't want to do, you know, Audra McDonald sings. You know, or here's my take on Kern. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and someday I would like to do a Jerome Kern album, but I thought this is something that I really have a very strong emotional connect to. Therefore, I'll be able to really bring something. something to it and bring my whole artistic being to it. And we can't let musical theater die either. And in this day and age where we have so many corporations taking over the production of musical theater or theater in general. there's so few mom-and-pop organizations out there and those are the ones truly that are the ones that are willing to give these young composers a chance and these new these new works a chance new plays as well as new musicals whereas a lot of the corporations want to you know rely on the the tried-and-true and dancing silverware yes yes yes I auditioned for Beauty and the Beast and I didn't get cast. I was auditioning for a piece of flatware and I didn't get cast. But the point being that you have to continue to replenish. Was it very disappointing, the popular failure of Marie Christine? Now this is Michael Gianluccio's Rodin Opera for you. Right, yeah. A musical theater opera. Yeah, people didn't know what to call it. Yeah, yeah. Which I also like when you can't really put a stamp on something. And it ran just a brief time. It ran the run it was supposed to do at Lincoln Center, but it didn't go anywhere after that. No. It was not disappointing in the sense that I got everything out of it that I thought I would get out of it. It was such a challenge. I loved that character. I loved her. It was Medea. It was Medea, but they just put it in New Orleans at the turn of the century and made her Creole. And you're going to do an opera? Yes, I am going to do an opera. Houston Grand Opera? Yes, I'm going to do in 2006. 2006. All right. I'm going to do in 2006. And this is the Poulenc. This is the Poulenc. The Poulenc, yes. It's called La Voix Humaine. Yes. And it's a... The human voice. Human voice. Very good, Linda. It's based on... It's a libretto by Jean Cocteau, and it's basically a woman breaking up with her lover on the phone. On the telephone. Yeah. And you don't ever hear his side of the conversation. You only hear hers. And then at the end of the opera, she hangs up the phone and dies of a broken heart. And you studied this and sang this at Juilliard, right? Yes, I did. It was one of the first things that... I had a wonderful teacher at Juilliard, Thomas Grubb, my French diction teacher, who then became my French vocal literature, and he just understood me in a way that a lot of the teachers didn't get. He understood that for me to truly let go, to find my voice, I needed something that was theatrical, and something that I could act, so I wouldn't... worry about what I was sounding like and I'd be concentrating on. And he said to me, you know, I think this might be a lot of fun for you. So he introduced it to me and I fell in love with it. And it was my biggest quote unquote success. Any chance that you'll do it here? Well, there's a lot of interest in it. That's for sure. I don't know if it would. There's a lot of interest all over the country, so we'll see. Okay. We'll see. I'm very pleased to know that you like Barbra Streisand. Of course I like Barbra Streisand. This was sort of formative, you know, that second album. What was it about... Streisand in your youth? Streisand was someone who just didn't fit any mold. You know, she was someone who, especially when she was doing doing a lot of those first albums and Funny Girl. She was who she was. She didn't apologize for what she was. And you felt that you knew her and you had a full experience of her artistic self. Just no boundaries, no fear. She was also very fearless, or she came across as fearless in her work. And she wasn't your typical pretty ingenue, you know. And that attracted me to her more than anything. I mean, the voice is, you know, super. supernatural, but the person, you can have a supernatural voice and have nothing underneath it to carry it up. And she had all of that. And it just, it gave me hope that, you know, I didn't have to be someone, you know, I didn't have to look like, like Grace Kelly, or I didn't have to look like Mary Martin or Julie Andrews in order to have a career on Broadway and to be, you know, I could be who I was and that be celebrated. And that's certainly who she was. Did you ever meet her? Yes, I have.

If this generation still has a hunger for Broadway royalty, and why should it not, she is the real thing. No boundaries? No boundaries. Cabaret, blues, Carnegie Hall, opera.

It's just all the same? Well, I think it's more about just I have an insatiable curiosity, you know, and I... am always very curious while I'm working on something, you know, well, what about if I turn to this next? I guess maybe that means I've got, you know, a mind that doesn't stay focused for very long or maybe it's just that I want to make sure that I've explored all that there is to explore about Sort of my artistic impulses, you know, and one doesn't have a lot of time on the planet, so I'm just trying to get it all in, I guess. That's kind of a horrifying thought.

I guess you don't do fluff. No, I don't. That's a weakness, you know.

We've got to say, where's the fluff? No, and maybe that just comes from my personality, but I don't. For me, if I'm not emotionally committed and artistically fulfilled by the material, I do a terrible job. I cannot fully bring myself to that project.

So for me, it has to truly engage me for me to be involved. Otherwise, I'm terrible. Okay, what is Roger Rokossov's Rocka's Music Hall. Close. Roger Rocka's.

Rocka. Roger Rocka. This is a music hall in Fresno, California.

Where you grew up. Where I grew up. You were born in Berlin. Born in Berlin.

My dad was in the Army, and then we moved to Fresno. And this was a dinner theater. And the resident theatrical company there was called the Good Company Players. And they still are in existence, and they do ten musicals a year.

and they had a little junior company group that would perform before each musical. They would do a cabaret every night before each musical. So I started with them when I was nine years old, and I left them when I was 17. And you did everything.

I did everything there. I mean, it really was the basis for my theatrical training. I also went to performing arts junior high and high school, but the basis for my theatrical training was being on stage every single night, basically from the time I was nine until the time I was 17, with certain breaks here and there.

You know, there's no better training. training. Ava Peron at 16? Yes. Is there a tape?

What I would give to see. There is a tape actually. You know it's funny I was double cast with another girl who was let's see she was about five years older than I was and you know Fresno at that time was not the most cultural places to be so people would call into the box office and say is the white or the black one on tonight?

Which ended up, I mean so was it was actually a big deal that I they cast me in the role was a big deal that they cast the one so young and it was a huge deal that they cast a black girl in it so that was sort of my first taste of sort of non-traditional casting and sort of the the fury or you know just the drama that surrounds something like that but for me it was just that I wanted to do the role. you know? That's all. There were some people who thought that it was odd that there was a black woman as Carrie. Your first Broadway musical, Carousel, directed by Nicholas Heitner, absolutely gorgeous production.

Yes, it was incredible. And there you were supposedly doing the, you know, the second lead, the fluffy girl. which you did not make into a fluffy girl, really, Carrie. Well, Nick Heitner wouldn't allow that.

You know, he did not approach that piece as, you know, a fluffy piece, which so many people can do because they think, oh, there's all these wonderful melodies, and it's Rodgers and Hammerstein, and it's Carousel, but, you know, let's look at the facts here. This is, you know, first of all, it's premarital sex. Then when they finally do get married, he's a wife-beater, and then he's a robber, and then, you know, I mean, there's lots of really deep, dark issues going on in this play, this musical.

And Nick was like... Let's just go in and really look at them and really play them for what they are, you know? And was there any issue about you and Mr. Snow?

I'm sure some people had issues with it, but no one that I was close to, and certainly no one in the production to us, you know, because if you looked at that production, the wondrous Shirley Verrett, the incredible opera singer, played Julie's cousin, Cousin Nettie. You know, so we weren't looking at race in that. We were looking at the story.

the human aspects of this story and race had nothing to do with it. You know, you are famous for Here I Am, Mr. Snow. You know this?

Here I am, Mr. Snow. You were actually sort of on your back on a kitchen table, right? Yes. Nick had me sort of, well, Mr. Snow, here I am, basically throw myself into what I would assume, what Carrie assumed her wedding night position would be, to put it.

daintily or not so daintily. And the other, actually, that comes from a very organic and real place because these are lusty, stinky working girls who work in these mills all day. They have not much money. Most of them have left their families to go work in this mill and live in this mill town.

So there is this part of them that exists. So Nick was just like, let's go with it and enjoy the fact that, you know, that's who they are. They're not prim and proper, you know. Highfalutin girls, these are lusty working women. Now when you went to Juilliard, you didn't study acting.

You studied opera? Yes, I studied classical voice at Juilliard. That was difficult for me. I've made it no secret.

It was a very difficult time for me at Juilliard. Mainly because when I moved to New York to go to Juilliard, I expected that I would be able to sing my Broadway stuff, and that's not what the program offered, and I just wasn't ready for what the program offered me. Looking back on it, it was an incredible education.

and it helped me to find my operatic voice, or better to say, it helped me to find all of my voice. Up until that time, I hadn't been using all that was there. How high does it go?

Oh, it doesn't. I mean, no Mariah Carey or anything like that, but, you know, I have like... You have a huge range. Yes, it's like a high E down to...

I don't know, like a G below middle C. That might not mean much to a lot of people. But, and no breaks in between.

That's what's really, it just really, it's one voice. Well, that's what I've always strived to have. And I have a wonderful teacher who I still go to on a regular basis.

And when I'm really working on a role or a part, I just did a John Adams premiere at the New York Philharmonic last May, which was an 11-minute aria, which, you know, had... you know, high C's and low A's all in the same passage, you know, on words like war and, you know, fire or whatever. So I was with my voice teacher every single day. It's like training for the Olympics, basically. I feel like you never stop learning.

So there you were with this opera background and you wanted to be on Broadway. And then Terence McNally was nice enough to write a play about Maria Callas so you could come in and play a student singing Lady Macbeth. Yes, yes.

That must have been a gift. You know, and I didn't even see it coming. I got a call saying that, you know, this was... this show was happening and would I be interested in auditioning for it?

And I said, oh, okay, yes, yes, yes. And they said, well, here's the aria you have to sing. And I was still doing Carousel at the time, and I walked into Shirley Barrett's room, and I said, hey, Shirley, didn't you sing Lady Macbeth? Well, here's the aria I have to sing.

And she looked at it, and she said, ooh, honey. She said, you better have a couple real strong high Cs. And I thought, oh, dear. And so I studied it and got it ready, and then on the day of the audition, I canceled. I thought, I can't do this.

And I said, never mind, I'm not going in. And then they called about two weeks later and said, we still haven't found anybody. Please reconsider coming in.

So, I mean, I was running away from this gift, I mean, in more ways than one that was just basically being handed to me on a silver platter. What a gift it turned out to be. out to be, to portray that role opposite that hurricane that is Zoe Caldwell, who has since become a major part of my life.

Your daughter's named Zoe. Named for Zoe, right, yes. She's named for Zoe Caldwell. well.

Seeing the two of them together is incredible. Was she three now? She's almost four.

She'll be four. Yes, she'll be four on Valentine's Day. And you can do this?

You know, have a Broadway career and a classical career? And a baby? And a baby and a husband in the field? Yes, it's very, very, it's very difficult because Your hours are so different and they're never the same.

There's no consistency. And consistency is something I think that is very important for children. So there's a lot of running around with Zoe.

A lot of, you know, we have many pictures of Zoe at many theaters. Zoe was at the theater every single Sunday when I was doing Henry IV. She's getting used to the life, which is good, but it scares me and my husband a little bit because we don't want her to become a performer. We want her to be a doctor.

Oh, maybe she'll rebel. I hope so. I hope she rebels.

Your parents are... Are? Are. Are.

Your father is musically trained, although a principal in high school. And your mother is a pianist, but runs the Affirmative Action? She's director of human resources at Vermont, University of Vermont.

Oh, it's Vermont now, not California. She was with California for years, and now she's at Vermont. And my dad is now associate superintendent. So they're very heavy in the education. So they clearly didn't say, we don't want our brilliant little girl to go on the nasty stage.

No, they said you may pursue that, but the only way you're going to New York is if you go to school. And you may pursue that, but you will get a... some sort of higher education degree because if you fall you know fall back on fall back on you can always teach yeah like there's always work at the post office cook I didn't learn that either did you graduate from Juilliard I know you took a mental sabbatical yes I did you go back yes I did I did graduate Took me a little longer than most of the kids in my class, but I did graduate.

I have since gone back and done many benefits for Juilliard, so I think we've paid each other back. I mean, I certainly put everybody through a lot of hell while I was there. But, yes, so when I went back to complete the one year I had missed. That's when I met my husband, so it was worth it. Your husband, whose name is?

Peter Donovan, and he's a bass player. He's a bass player, yes. And he works in Broadway?

Yes, Broadway. He does Broadway shows. He does, he plays for...

American Symphony Orchestra, he is subbed with the New York Philharmonic and now, as I was saying to you before we started rolling, Barbara Cook stole him from me. He's now the bass player for Barbara Cook. Oh, really? But that's okay. I said, honey, it's okay.

That's a great soprano. You can go to her. that you'll share.

Yes, Barbara knows that I share. That's so sweet. There was a break after Marie Christine, and then you people, you know, we could have assumed that the disappointment of Marie Christine, which is really the one thing that sort of didn't work out. We can talk about that.

And you sort of disappeared for a while, but you were out making a baby. Well, I was having a baby. I was still doing a lot of concerts.

I was recording my second album. I just wasn't on the Broadway stage at that point, and so a lot of people thought I just sort of disappeared. She's not in front of me, therefore she must be crying. Yes, I must be crying somewhere. She's in her room crying.

Which I mean from my pregnancy too and I was also that time off I was also filming wit with Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson so I was actually very very busy and then I had some complications with my pregnancy that put me on bed rest at five and a half months pregnant and I had to stay in bed until two weeks before the baby was born. You can't sit still. No and it was terrible. My poor husband, my poor dog. That's all I have to say but they got me through it.

Yeah, someone wrote something wonderful about, I think, You know, one of those sentences I wish I had written, that you're like a party favor about to pop. And I would think putting this woman in bed for months would be... It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

And it was so difficult that I don't really remember it now. It's something that I think I've sort of wiped out of my mind. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

You know, I mean, it was necessary to make sure that my baby didn't come early and that she was healthy, so it was absolutely the right thing to do. But... But to stay still all that time and just sort of ponder, you know, whether this baby was going to be okay for three and a half months was terrible.

Could you sing? I mean, can you vocalize and stuff? Well, they asked me not to because the contractions were bad. And so anything that was going to irritate that area was not good.

So I just watched a lot of the Learning Channel network. I was on the computer a lot. I ate.

I was a very big girl when I gave birth. I gained like 75 pounds. And then once the baby was born, I haven't slept since. So I should have looked at it as a blessing because I have since not had one full night of sleep. I had been thinking before, well, here is at least one real stage creature who hasn't gone Hollywood and decided what she needs is an annuity and besides they write such interesting scripts there now.

You did? Mr. Sterling? Yes, well, I did Mr. Sterling.

Because that was a script and a show that I really believed in. And even though the network wasn't behind us... This was NBC? It was NBC. ABC, I'm sorry.

It was NBC. It was Josh Brolin, myself, William Russell, and David Neronia. And we had an incredible time with that show, and we really believed in the message about this guy who was not owned by anybody. A senator.

A senator. Someone who's appointed a senator after another senator dies. but basically was not owned by anybody, coming in to shake up Washington politics. And what I liked about it with my character is that she was so high up in his administration. Chief of staff.

She was his chief of staff. She was his confidant. She became like his best friend. And there was a real wonderful sort of energy between the two of us there. And a lot of people would write and say, well, when are Jackie and Mr. Sterling going to get together?

Whatever. And, of course, the network's like, that can't happen. He's black, he's white, it can never happen, you know. Still, still.

But I love that the audiences that were interested in our show were wanting that and were so engaged by the fantasy that someone could go and actually shake up Washington in that way. Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Did you like doing a different script every week? I did.

The one thing I didn't like about it was the hours. I thought Broadway was hard, you know. There was nothing like a 16-hour day on a set. And basically doing a one-hour drama is filming.

A little movie every 10 days. So you never really get to settle into your character. And by the time you get all those lines down, it's all changed and it's all different, you know. So it was killed after?

We had 10 episodes. 10 episodes. Yeah.

So, you know, for me it was a great experience. It renovated my house. The money was good. You live in Westchester?

I live in Westchester, yeah. We just moved there about two years ago. But the experience was invaluable. And if I go back to television or something like that, I mean, I've had a few offers and I've been close for a couple of things, but it really has to be the right role. I refuse to do sort of stereotypical in the box.

I certainly don't do that in my life in theater and in music, and I'll be damned if I'm going to do that in Hollywood. So if it means that I don't have a relationship with Hollywood, that's fine. You certainly don't do the stereotypical.

Even when I saw you in Raisin in the Sun, and there you were. I've seen you in nontraditional casting for so long. I know. I finally was actually playing some of my type. Playing this black woman in this black family with...

Sean Combs. Right, right. And what was that like?

That was an incredible experience. Felicia, Rashad, and I fought it. We didn't want to do it.

Yeah. We were like, Raisin in the Sun, come on. I mean, everybody does Raisin in the Sun. You know, it's just the mama on the couch.

You know, we had very sort of close-minded ideas about it. And then... When Sean got cast, we really got concerned.

We didn't understand. Can he do this? And it wasn't until Felicia and I sat down and had a meeting with Sean and the director, and we saw how passionate they were about it.

I went and read the script again. I remember actually even my... my mother-in-law at my house one night picking up the script and reading it and the next morning saying, that's powerful.

It really is. And I think it was by the time I got to Ruth's big explosion when she finds out that they're going to move that I thought, I am a fool. have to do this. I have to do this. And the care that was taken with that production and making sure that it was really serving Lorraine Hansberry's writing, that we didn't do anything that was a cliche, that Sean worked his tail off.

I can probably tell this story about Sean now that it's all over. Sean had the entire set built in his apartment. Oh my God.

So he'd come home. For anybody who doesn't know Sean Combs. Holmes is also P.

Diddy and Hoff Diddy. Yes, everybody knows who he is. Okay, now we're done. Okay, go ahead. But this man had the set built in his apartment so that when we would finish rehearsal, after six hours, eight hours of rehearsal, he'd go home with his coach and rehearse all night long.

The man was tireless. And then to bring in the audiences that we brought in. And these people would be loud before the show started and diddy for a couple minutes. into it.

And then by the end of the show they were quiet as a mouse, they were they were standing and applauding, they were crying, and this was an introduction to theater for them. So for me the whole experience, once again me running from this experience, it turned out to be. You know life-altering for me, and it was the hardest character I've ever played maybe it's because there were so many things about her that were too close to me that I had a hard time Finding you know you know Ruby Dee when we interviewed here didn't want to play Ruth I'm sure she wanted to play beneath the right either. Yeah, I'm tired I'm here to be the one who's doing the ironing, the long-suffering wife.

Come on, I want to be... Ruby Dee came backstage and she looked at me and she said, poor Ruth, stuck behind the ironing board of life. Which is true. But there's a lot of wonderful stuff about Ruth. She has, I think, the best sort of rebirth.

Really, it was beautiful, really wonderful. Wonderfully sad play. Yes, and you know, I couldn't have done it any longer.

It was one of those things that it was a wonderful experience, but I couldn't live that life. any longer than I did on stage because it took a lot out of me. You have a missionary zeal about a lot of things, but particularly useful is about new musical theater. And when you made your first record, first record, your solo, you could have done anything and sold anything. And instead, you chose all the leading new composer lyricists and interpreted them in a way that I think...

The value is incalculable. Anyway, it's so valuable because people then would come to hear you and then end up hearing these songs. No, that was very important to me and I didn't think of it as a huge deal. I mean, I thought of it as, this is what I want to do.

I've been singing a lot of their stuff anyway in different workshops and readings and concerts and I thought that my record producer agreed with me, what a great idea to throw them all together on a disc and I just didn't want to do, you know, Audra McDonald sings. You know, or here's my take on Kern. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and someday I would like to do a Jerome Kern album, but I thought this is something that I really have a very strong emotional connect to.

Therefore, I'll be able to really bring something. something to it and bring my whole artistic being to it. And we can't let musical theater die either. And in this day and age where we have so many corporations taking over the production of musical theater or theater in general.

there's so few mom-and-pop organizations out there and those are the ones truly that are the ones that are willing to give these young composers a chance and these new these new works a chance new plays as well as new musicals whereas a lot of the corporations want to you know rely on the the tried-and-true and dancing silverware yes yes yes I auditioned for Beauty and the Beast and I didn't get cast. I was auditioning for a piece of flatware and I didn't get cast. But the point being that you have to continue to replenish.

Was it very disappointing, the popular failure of Marie Christine? Now this is Michael Gianluccio's Rodin Opera for you. Right, yeah. A musical theater opera. Yeah, people didn't know what to call it.

Yeah, yeah. Which I also like when you can't really put a stamp on something. And it ran just a brief time.

It ran the run it was supposed to do at Lincoln Center, but it didn't go anywhere after that. No. It was not disappointing in the sense that I got everything out of it that I thought I would get out of it.

It was such a challenge. I loved that character. I loved her. It was Medea.

It was Medea, but they just put it in New Orleans at the turn of the century and made her Creole. And you're going to do an opera? Yes, I am going to do an opera. Houston Grand Opera?

Yes, I'm going to do in 2006. 2006. All right. I'm going to do in 2006. And this is the Poulenc. This is the Poulenc. The Poulenc, yes. It's called La Voix Humaine.

Yes. And it's a... The human voice. Human voice. Very good, Linda.

It's based on... It's a libretto by Jean Cocteau, and it's basically a woman breaking up with her lover on the phone. On the telephone.

Yeah. And you don't ever hear his side of the conversation. You only hear hers.

And then at the end of the opera, she hangs up the phone and dies of a broken heart. And you studied this and sang this at Juilliard, right? Yes, I did.

It was one of the first things that... I had a wonderful teacher at Juilliard, Thomas Grubb, my French diction teacher, who then became my French vocal literature, and he just understood me in a way that a lot of the teachers didn't get. He understood that for me to truly let go, to find my voice, I needed something that was theatrical, and something that I could act, so I wouldn't... worry about what I was sounding like and I'd be concentrating on. And he said to me, you know, I think this might be a lot of fun for you.

So he introduced it to me and I fell in love with it. And it was my biggest quote unquote success. Any chance that you'll do it here?

Well, there's a lot of interest in it. That's for sure. I don't know if it would. There's a lot of interest all over the country, so we'll see.

Okay. We'll see. I'm very pleased to know that you like Barbra Streisand.

Of course I like Barbra Streisand. This was sort of formative, you know, that second album. What was it about...

Streisand in your youth? Streisand was someone who just didn't fit any mold. You know, she was someone who, especially when she was doing doing a lot of those first albums and Funny Girl.

She was who she was. She didn't apologize for what she was. And you felt that you knew her and you had a full experience of her artistic self.

Just no boundaries, no fear. She was also very fearless, or she came across as fearless in her work. And she wasn't your typical pretty ingenue, you know.

And that attracted me to her more than anything. I mean, the voice is, you know, super. supernatural, but the person, you can have a supernatural voice and have nothing underneath it to carry it up. And she had all of that.

And it just, it gave me hope that, you know, I didn't have to be someone, you know, I didn't have to look like, like Grace Kelly, or I didn't have to look like Mary Martin or Julie Andrews in order to have a career on Broadway and to be, you know, I could be who I was and that be celebrated. And that's certainly who she was. Did you ever meet her?

Yes, I have.

Transcript for:Insights from Audra McDonald Interview

Transcript for:
Insights from Audra McDonald Interview