The New Yorker Radio Hour
Audra McDonald on Stephen Sondheim, “Gypsy,” and Being Black on Broadway
09 Dec 2024
“Gypsy,” a work by Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and Arthur Laurents, is often called the greatest of American musicals; a new production on Broadway is a noteworthy event, especially when a star like Audra McDonald is cast in the lead role of Rose. McDonald has won six Tonys for her acting, in both plays and musicals. In the repertoire of musicals, race in casting is still very much an issue, and one columnist criticized her portrayal of Rose because of her race. “I have dealt with this my entire career,” McDonald tells Michael Schulman, recalling that in her breakout performance, in “Carousel,” some audiences “were upset with me that I was playing Carrie, saying, ‘She wouldn’t have been Black.’ There’s a man who comes down from heaven with a star in his hand!” In a wide-ranging interview onstage at The New Yorker Festival, McDonald discusses how when she was a child theatre was initially intended to be a type of therapy for her, and the roles her parents wouldn’t let her take. “Gypsy” is currently in previews on Broadway.
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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The show Gypsy, an early work by Stephen Sondheim, is sometimes called the greatest of American musicals. A new production on Broadway is a real event. all the more so when a star like Audra McDonald is in the lead role of Rose, a complicated stage mother with outsized ambitions for her daughters.
Rose has been called, and I think it's only half-joking, the King Lear of musical theater. Audra McDonald has won six Tonys as an actor in plays as well as musicals, and she joined us at the New Yorker Festival in October as the cast of Gypsy was getting ready for previews. Here's staff writer Michael Shulman.
Audra, thanks so much for being here. I know you're deep in rehearsal. Yeah, we're in week four of rehearsals right now. How's it going? What did you guys do, like, today?
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.
That's intense.
It's very intense. Very intense, yeah. But...
Wow. Has this been a long dream of yours, goal of yours to play Rose, or was it something that came up more recently? Like, how did this...
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.
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