She holds the Broadway record with six competitive Tony Award wins, one ahead of the legendary Angela Lansbury.
Next week, Audra McDonald performs live at the Kennedy Center with accompaniment by the National Symphony Orchestra for two concerts on Tuesday, Jan. 30, and Wednesday, Jan 31.
“It’s going to be a journey through the great American musical theater songbook,” McDonald told WTOP. “I’ll be singing songs by Gershwin, Sondheim, Jerome Kern, just the old greats of Broadway. I’m so excited about it. … Once in a while, I’m very lucky to be able to perform with an orchestra. There is nothing like the thrill of being on stage with that incredible tsunami of sound coming from anywhere from 40 to 60 instruments supporting you.”
McDonald is no stranger to the Kennedy Center, having performed there many times over the years.
“I’ve been there a lot,” McDonald said. “I think the last time I was there was for Michael Tilson Thomas, I think that was right before the pandemic, but yes, I was there for Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis’ Kennedy Center Honors, I was there for Barbara Cook’s Kennedy Center Honor, I was there for Julie Andrews’ Kennedy Center Honor, so I’ve been there quite a few times. It’s such an iconic place. … For me, it’s always a joy to come back there.”
D.C. also holds a special place in her heart after receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.
“It was very exciting,” McDonald said. “I was like two weeks away from giving birth. I was hugely pregnant at the White House and I was worried because I had what they call a geriatric pregnancy because I was 46 at the time. I asked, ‘What if I go into labor?’ They were like, ‘This is the White House. We have the best doctors ever. Don’t worry,’ so I was like, ‘Maybe I should go into labor. That would be a hell-of-a story: I gave birth at the White House!'”
Born on a U.S. Army base in Berlin, McDonald mostly grew up in Fresno, California, before attending Juilliard in New York.
She won her very first Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for “Carousel” in 1994.
“Just something that will never, ever leave my heart, just the beginnings,” McDonald said. “Also, Lincoln Center where ‘Carousel’ was [staged] was basically my campus because I had gone to Juilliard, so it was like school on steroids. All of a sudden I was in a Broadway show.”
She won again for Best Featured Actress in a Play for “Master Class” in 1996.
“The great thing about ‘Master Class’ was that … I was playing a Juilliard student, so something I knew a lot about,” McDonald said. “It was a chance to get to work with Terrence McNally and get to know him and become a very dear friend in my life, I worked with him many times after that, but also to get to know and work with Zoe Caldwell, who would become such a force in my life that I would end up naming my first child that.”
Her third Tony win came for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for “Ragtime” in 1998.
“Just being a part of building a show from the beginnings of watching that show come together and working with that incredible cast,” McDonald said. “Being with the iconic Brian Stokes Mitchell on a nightly basis, every single time we’d sing ‘Wheels of a Dream’ from the first time we sang it together until, as recently as the 25th anniversary reunion concert that we did in March, I always feel like I’m basically flying into space every time we sing that.”
Her fourth Tony win was for Best Featured Actress in a Play for “A Raisin in the Sun” in 2004.
“It was incredible,” McDonald said. “Being able to work with an incredible director like Kenny Leon and an incredible cast that featured Phylicia Rashad and Sanaa Lathan, I learned so much from being with them on a nightly basis. Saying Lorraine Hansberry’s iconic words was a core memory. I’ll never forget that experience.”
Her fifth Tony win came for Best Actress in a Musical for “Porgy & Bess” in 2012.
“Being a part of ‘Porgy & Bess’ is, I keep saying iconic, but it’s a legendary opera or musical, whichever people want to categorize it as,” McDonald said. “To be able to be a part of that, coming back to Broadway and getting to sing those glorious songs night after night and to really get to dive in and find who Bess was in my heart, was something that meant a great deal to me, so it was an honor to be able to do that.”
Her sixth and most recent Tony win was for Best Actress in a Play for “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” in 2014.
“I had always been a fan of Billie Holiday, but I was a bit of an uneducated fan,” McDonald said. “I adored her for her artistry, but I think what little I knew about her life, I was a bit judgmental because I knew she had this horrible drug addiction. Once I got a chance to play her and really excavate, understand, explore and study her life, speak to people who knew her, read every book I could, listen to every interview … I ended up falling in love with her.”
Most recently, she’s up for a SAG Award for Best Ensemble for HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” in which she plays the mother of Denée Benton, who is also coming to the Kennedy Center this week in Jonathan Larson’s “Tick … Tick … Boom!”
“I’m so proud of that show,” McDonald said. “I was so excited to be asked to be a part of it, so I’m very proud of the nomination for the cast. It is an enormous cast and it is a real theater-based cast. Most of us are really well known in the theatrical world, not necessarily in film and television, some obviously, Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski and Carrie Coon … but most people in that cast are theater folks, so I’m very proud to be a part of this project.”
Now, she’s just one “O” away from an “EGOT,” having already won two Grammys for “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany” and an Emmy for the TV special “Sweeney Todd (Live from Lincoln Center).” Surely, her future Oscar-winning role is somewhere out there as she continues to work with great film directors, from Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” to George W. Wolfe’s “Rustin,” the latter of which just earned an Oscar nomination for Colman Domingo.
“To be a part of ‘Rustin’ and watch Colman Domingo work, I’ve been a fan of his for years,” McDonald said. “[For ‘Origin’] what Ava DuVernay did with adapting Isabel Wilkerson’s incredible book ‘Caste’ … brilliantly portrayed by Aunjanue Ellis[-Taylor] … I was so excited to be a part of that, to watch these women work. … When I watched the whole film, I’ve never been so emotionally affected by a film in my life. I couldn’t breathe afterward. I was so moved.”
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