Q&A: Multitalented Audra McDonald talks about her Broadway, singing, film and TV career
Sometimes it seems as though actress-soprano Audra McDonald is everywhere — from the Broadway stage to the television screen to your CD player or streaming service.
The multitalented, Tony-, Grammy- and Emmy-winning performer has starred on Broadway in productions including “Carousel,” “Master Class” and “Ragtime,” recorded numerous albums, and appeared in television series, including “The Good Fight” on CBS and “The Gilded Age” on HBO.
On Feb. 27 at the McCoy Center for the Arts in New Albany, McDonald will give a solo concert featuring music from Broadway, the jazz world and beyond. The performer, who will be joined by a pianist, has long been sought after by programmers at the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA), which manages the McCoy Center.
“Her schedule is rather hectic, so we’ve never been able to align dates up with her calendar,” said Rich Corsi, vice president of programming at CAPA. “I reached out to (her) agent and they said, ‘Well, we could make this date work’ — and I about fell out of my chair.”
McDonald, 51, spoke recently by phone with The Dispatch about the concert, her recent role as Aretha Franklin’s mother in the movie “Respect” and a future project with an Ohio connection.
Question: What is the basic setup of the concert?
McDonald: It’s just me and a pianist. It’s an evening through the Great American Musical Theatre Songbook. What I like to think of it as is an evening where it’s like I wander into your living room, or you come into my living room, and I’m singing to you and talking to you and we get to know each other by the end of the night. I do Rodgers and Hammerstein and (Stephen) Sondheim and Duke Ellington. I honor artists like Diahann Carroll and Barbara Cook and Lena Horne and people like that who have influenced me.
Tony Meredith:Columbus ballroom dancer Tony Meredith teaming with Vanessa Williams for special event
Audra McDonald Q & A
Q: What appeals to you about intimate concerts like this?
McDonald: It’s one of the freer forms of live performance, and really anything can happen. Not that anything can’t happen when you’re doing a musical or a play or when you’re playing with a lot of instruments ... but there is just more of a freedom because it’s just me and my music director. If I feel like stopping, if I feel like telling a story or if I want to talk to somebody in the audience, there’s just no freer setting to let that happen in live theater.
Q: You mentioned Stephen Sondheim, who died in November at age 91. Did you know him well?
McDonald: I knew Sondheim very well. He was someone who I considered to be a mentor and a supporter from the earliest parts of my career and someone who was always sort of in my ear. ... He was the reason we named my third album “Happy Songs.” He’s like, “Audra, do you sing any happy songs? You should sing some happy songs.”
Oscars:Two Ohioans tied to films with Oscar nominations: J.K. Simmons and Mike Faist
He came to every show I was ever in. I have tons of letters and emails from him, and I’ve gone to dinner with him. Many, many memories — one that makes me laugh is when he was writing to me about something, and I had just announced that I was pregnant with my now-5-year-old. He wrote me an email that was dealing with other stuff (but said), “But don’t worry about that. Have a wonderful time and have a happy baby.”
Q: You recently played the mother of Aretha Franklin in the movie “Respect,” starring Jennifer Hudson. Did you have any trepidation about taking the role?
McDonald: The only trepidation I had was that there’s not a lot that was known about her, so that could be a good thing or a bad thing. It could be a good thing in that you can in some ways have liberty. But because Aretha’s family was very involved with this project, the people that mattered, who did know her, were very involved. I wanted to make sure that I was honoring their memory of their great-grandmother, grandmother, mother.
Events:From dance diva Dua Lipa to Swedish rockers Ghost, Columbus venues offer array of concerts
It ended up being for me a wonderful thing because not many people knew about Aretha’s mother and that she was a singer and her early death and the effect she had on Aretha’s life. ... I was very pleased about that, and obviously getting the opportunity to work with Jennifer Hudson, who’s just phenomenal.
Q: What’s next for you?
McDonald: I’m getting ready to start filming the sixth season of “The Good Fight” with Christine Baranski next week. Then I’m on the new show “The Gilded Age” this season on HBO. Then I’ll be coming back to Broadway with a play by a brilliant Black playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, who is 90 years old (and) has never had a play on Broadway before. It’s called “Ohio State Murders.”
Q: What’s “Ohio State Murders” about?
McDonald: It’s a published play that has been performed before, but has never been performed on Broadway. ... It’s (about) a woman in her 50s who is invited to go give a speech at Ohio State (University), where she talks about the violence in her work; she’s now a writer. And in giving this speech, in preparing this speech, she ends up reliving her time as a student at Ohio State and the racism she experienced there and sort of a deep, dark secret of what happened to her while she was there.
tonguetteauthor2@aol.com
At a glance
Audra McDonald will perform at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 27 at the McCoy Center for the Arts, 100 W. Dublin-Granville Road, New Albany. Masks and proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 test are required. Patrons are encouraged to use the Bindle check-in app. Tickets start at $64. For more information, visit www.mccoycenter.org.