Audra McDonald
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Audra McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We started the day working on Everything's Coming Up Roses. And then after lunch, we did Roses Turn. So that's how my day's gone today.
It's very intense. Very intense, yeah. But...
Yeah. Dark for you. I mean, was it a longtime dream of mine? No. No. It's a show that I obviously grew up knowing and loving, and I was in it in my dinner theater in Fresno, California. I played one of Uncle Jocko's kiddies. And, you know, I've seen, you know, the few iterations that I've been able to see, you know, obviously in the movie, the TV movie. Yeah.
And it really was a Thanksgiving dinner that I had probably about six years ago. And... The late, great Gavin Creel was a very, very dear friend of ours. Very, very, very close. We were very close to him. And we usually spent Thanksgivings together. And he was there. And he said, I want to talk to you about something. I want to talk to you about something. And then he pulled me into the garage.
He's like, here, come here, come here, come here. You need to play Rose in Gypsy. You got to do it. You just got to do it. Can you imagine a black woman? It has to be you. You got to do it. You got to do it. I was like, what? You're crazy. He's like, you have to do this. You have to do this. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. Yeah, I could see how it could be played by a black woman.
And yeah, that'd be a real challenge. And then just conversations kind of started. And Stephen Sondheim was obviously still alive at the time. And he was very supportive of the idea and said yes. And then we started down that long road. And it just took a long time for it all to come together, timing and whatnot.
Sondheim another one that I miss terribly he's always been an incredible teacher and supporter very supportive my career has always sort of like offered suggestions and ideas and he would come to all my shows and just be supportive and whenever I was in any sort of performance involving his music, he was there and had his thoughts. And I just felt very supported by him.
And so when it was brought up to him, he thought it was a great idea. And he said, I think that's terrific. And actually there was another show of his too that, you know, he kind of wanted me to be a part of as well. And I was like, well, is it okay if we do this one first? He's like, whichever one you want to do first, that's fine with me. What's the other one? A little night music.
Maybe some of that.
Let me get this one out of the way.
Oh, no, no, no. You have to, you know, I mean, the great thing about Gypsy is, is while it's based on, you know, the real life story of Gypsy Rose Lee, it is very specifically about
On the libretto, the only way they were able to legally actually do it, because June Havoc almost tried to stop Arthur Lawrence and Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim because she wasn't happy with the way she was being depicted in the show. And so the way that they were able to legally get beyond that was to call this a musical fable. And so it's suggested by, you know, her history.
So obviously I start with that as source material. You know, you have to. And then I sort of build in, okay, she can still be from Seattle, of course. There were black people in Seattle then. There's enough actual history that I can then use based on Rose's life and what I know about life for black people at that time as well and bring that into the story too.
It's not saying, oh, we have to kind of make believe that there were black people performing in vaudeville at this time. We have to kind of make believe that there were black people in Seattle. There were black people who ended up becoming strippers or any of that. We don't have to make believe. It actually happened. It actually existed. And so it's embodied.
But I will say we're not changing a single solitary line in the show. Not a single solitary one. There's no need. And some of them actually exist. hit in a different way. Really? When you think about some of the lines coming out of a black woman, they hit in a different way in 2024.
Square sort of things that don't historically maybe line up in a literal way It's a musical fable That's all I got I have a lot more but that's all I'll say it's a musical fable. It's a fable How do you square that people just burst into song? Look, I mean, I have dealt with this my entire career.
You know, people upset with me for, you know, that I was playing Carrie in Carousel saying, well, she wouldn't have been black. There's a man who comes down from heaven with a star in his hand. People who are going to want to come and see the show and take the journey with us can take the journey. Those who want to intellectualize and make it about something else, they can do that too.
But that's what we're doing. We're telling the story. Amen.
Yeah, I had gone to Juilliard because I was from Fresno and I wanted to be on Broadway. I've known that I wanted to be on Broadway since I was nine and I moved there. to New York and I went to Juilliard because they accepted me. But I auditioned in the vocal department instead of in the acting department. It was probably what I should have done.
But I just thought, well, I have a strong voice so I'll do that. And so what I underestimated was how much I would be shoved in the classical direction vocally. And I wasn't really given the opportunity to take acting lessons, to take movement or, you know, diction like all the other acting students at Juilliard were doing. You know, people like, actually, I was in school with Viola Davis.
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