She’s Free of All the Usual Limits

It is 11 p.m., and Audra McDonald is standing in the nearly empty lobby of the Saroyan Theatre with her fingers in her ears and her eyes clenched shut.

Twenty-nine years old, a darling of the Broadway stage and beloved by some of the best-known and most promising playwrights, composers and conductors of our time, McDonald has just entertained a sold-out audience of 2,300 with songs from her new CD, “How Glory Goes,” but she’s still working hard. Just like when she was 6 years old and performing in this same theater for the first time in a dance recital.

Audra McDonald has come home.

Right now she’s visibly nervous, trying to shut out a 90-second synopsis of her career airing on a TV monitor in front of her, the lead-in to a live interview with the local reporter facing her. The bio began with a quick hit of McDonald in a dinner-theater performance, which made her scream with laughter. So she’s composing herself to go on the air.

Lights, camera . . .

It’s as if a different person appears. Fully composed, absolutely focused, McDonald faces the camera like someone who’s been preparing for this moment her whole life. And in a way, she has.

McDonald is a meticulous performer who invests her whole self in anything she does. That quality has helped her win Tonys for each of the three major roles she’s played on Broadway, the youngest to win so many. It is also what made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1998 at the Gershwin centennial such a smash. And it is what transformed her turn as Grace, the secretary-fiancee to Oliver Warbucks, in the recent acclaimed “The Wonderful World of Disney” TV reprise of “Annie” into more than just a supporting role.

For a girl who once considered herself a bit of a geek but promised herself she’d be famous someday, playing Fresno is a big deal. And anyway, all of her teachers, friends and her enormous extended family are watching.

*

Fresno’s seemingly endless stretch of suburbia in the middle of raisin country might seem an unlikely breeding ground for Broadway, but McDonald is the product of three very ambitious support systems: a highly educated and very musical family, a junior dinner-theater company that provided friends and professional training, and a public-school arts magnet program that gave her enough grounding to get into Juilliard as a voice student for college.

Onstage at the stark, downtown convention-center Saroyan, McDonald’s presence is magnetic. She talks like a regular person, poking fun at her bass player--Peter Donovan, a Juilliard classmate who is now her fiance--and jokes about everything from politics to childhood memories. But she sings with a timeless authority that defies her youthfulness and has led innumerable writers to compare her to legends like Ethel Merman, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. She explores the emotional content of the songs as she performs them, making the impact of each story line equal to the music.

“Her voice is so spectacular,” says Michael John LaChiusa, composer-author of her most recent Broadway foray, “Marie Christine,” and whose work she sings on “Way Back to Paradise,” her first album, as well as in concert.

“Her voice touches a whole range of emotions. She has two full octaves where every note is solid. When she’s singing a lullaby, she has a beautiful lyric soprano. If the character is angry, there are notes that can be used for that. When she is in moments of regret, moments of sadness. . . .

“But what people overlook,” LaChiusa says, “is that she has this potential of being the great actress of our century. And then there’s a third thing, which is she’s quite beautiful and is meant for the stage. Those three elements working all together make quite a unique combination.”

*

These days she is considered one of the true serious young theatrical artists, an actress and singer of equal strength who is willing to pursue ambitious new work, including operatic undertakings like LaChiusa’s “Marie Christine,” at a time when popular fare along the lines of Disney’s new Broadway “Aida” would probably give her more exposure. Perhaps what’s most impressive about where McDonald is today is that she has gotten there very much on her own terms. At this point, a lot of work is offered to her, but she chooses, she says, entirely on gut reaction--whether in response to the soul of the music or to the dignity of the role.

As an African American, she is a symbol of hope for a time when roles will be given out entirely for talent and not just type. Taught early by her parents to turn down any role that might stereotype blacks, McDonald has played parts that allow her to acknowledge her race, when the story calls for it, but she also reaches for whatever interests her.

“I’ve been very lucky” is a mantra McDonald repeats regularly in conversation. And, indeed, it’s true. For a revival of “Carousel” in the early ‘90s, the producers were looking to move outside the homogeneous mold, so McDonald was cast as Carrie, without prejudice.

“I’ve been at the right place at the right time,” she says modestly in an interview after her Fresno performance. “They were looking to cast ‘Carousel’ colorblind, they didn’t know who or what. They wanted to make it a nonissue, and I just came along.”

Her success in the role was her own accomplishment, however--a complete unknown when the show opened on Broadway in 1994, she gave a lusty reinterpretation of the once-prim role that was immediately identified by the critics as a show-stealer, and her first Tony was the result.

Thanks to Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, Leona Mitchell and Denyce Graves, the world of opera has become considerably more heterogeneous than the other arts, but veteran stage star Zoe Caldwell admits that she initially questioned the historical accuracy of casting a black in Terrence McNally’s “Master Class” as the precocious student who would sing one of Verdi’s most difficult arias for Caldwell’s Maria Callas. At McNally’s prodding, however, she acquiesced. McDonald once again won a Tony.

But while neither of McDonald’s first two major Broadway roles addressed questions of race, she immediately went on to play two fierce and decidedly memorable African American women on Broadway, in “Ragtime,” and then last fall in “Marie Christine.” In each she created iconic roles for young black actresses, something rare until now in the theatrical canon.

Sarah, the mother who tries to bury her baby alive in “Ragtime,” is a heartbreaking portrait of an unmarried black woman with no options. It won McDonald her third Tony, in 1998. And now there’s talk that she’ll be nominated again this spring, for the title role of “Marie Christine,” in which she plays a Medea-inspired Creole who murders her two sons rather than let them go with their father, the lover who spurned her. LaChiusa’s musical verges on opera in its classical tenor and challenges McDonald’s vocal range. For it, her notices were as favorable as ever, though some reviewers called the show somewhat arduous. A cast recording will be released by BMG/RCA Victor on April 18.

Although she has legions of fans, there also are many people who do not yet know her name and who might not recognize her from one role to the next, so different are they from each other.

“That’s the whole thing about Audra,” says San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who has worked often with McDonald--conducting her doing Gershwin with the San Francisco Symphony, as well as Copland with the New World Symphony in Miami, and in a recent millennial celebration in San Francisco. Tilson Thomas says he didn’t recognize McDonald in “Master Class,” even after admiring her work in “Carousel.” “She is such a totally focused chameleon, at the moment that she is performing a particular role, she is so totally in that role that everything about it is as if that’s who she is. And yet she has such an unbelievable range to be so many other things.”

Theater director Rob Marshall, who directed Disney’s TV “Annie,” agrees: “I think Audra is limitless. You think, ‘Well, she’s just a singer,’ but she’s not. Not only was she able to deliver this role, but she was able to deliver it on film, which is a whole other technique. On film you have to do much less but feel it just as deeply, and she was a total pro. I said nothing to her about the size of her performance, nothing. She’s a natural film actress.”

Still, there are those who don’t want to lose her from her home in the theater. McNally, who wrote both “Master Class” and the book of “Ragtime,” says, “I think her future is huge. I just hope we can keep her in the theater. She is the type of actress who can inspire writers, the way Mary Martin did in her heyday.”

*

These days Broadway is not on McDonald’s mind.

“It’s been six years just doing shows,” she says. “It’s time to ease off a bit. It’s not an easy path, because I don’t have any particular role model that I’m following. You have to trust your gut with what is offered to you and what feels right. The other thing, too, is always facing the challenges. There are a lot of things that I’ve chosen to do that scare me to death.”

Among them are the two very different worlds where she’s been spending her time in recent weeks--in concert and on a network TV set. For the former she’s hit seven cities since early March and is scheduled to appear in 11 more by August, including doing a concert version of “Sweeney Todd” at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic May 4-7, and a concert with Patti LuPone and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at the Bowl on July 8.

Despite her apparent confidence onstage, McDonald says she suffers from enormous stage fright: “I’m comfortable in the theater because it’s where I grew up,” she says, laughing, in a conversation back in New York, where she’s lived since entering Juilliard in 1988. “For the concerts, I still get very, very nervous; I run to the bathroom 5 million times. I’ll be standing in the wings ready to go on, then I’ll say--’I’ll be right back.’ Just nerves. I never understood how Barbra Streisand would talk about stage fright after she had become so huge, but now I do.”

She’s also seeking out dramatic roles with no singing at all, and she says TV scares her a bit because it, too, is so unfamiliar. She guest-stars in two episodes of NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” this season, next Friday and May 19, playing a forensic psychologist who helps analyze victims and perpetrators for the detectives. In the last of the two, she also is asked to interview Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek) and his staff to see if any of the cops are ready to crack under the pressure of continually investigating sex crimes. What she finds is part of the end-of-season cliffhanger.

To see McDonald on the set of “SVU,” as it’s referred to by those associated with the show, is to see someone radically toned down from the combination ingenue-diva who appears in her singing roles. As she films a scene with Florek, interviewing his character about his problems with alcohol, she quietly nods her head like a therapist--serious, composed and quiet. Cameras hovering around, mikes hanging in her face, a crowd of actors and various crew members everywhere, there’s no room for McDonald’s full personality to appear, but she’s intent on being a member of the team.

She’s impressed the cast--all of whom have also been begging her for copies of her new CD. “SVU” co-executive producer Ted Kotcheff, known for directing such films as “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and “North Dallas Forty,” directs the cliffhanger episode. He cast McDonald when Queen Latifah wasn’t available.

“Audra is a wonderful actress,” he says during a break between takes. He also says he’s impressed enough to consider bringing her character back next season.

*

The frantic pace of McDonald’s life is evident as she relaxes in her dressing room between shooting scenes of “SVU.” It’s a Tuesday now, in the middle of the day. You’d never know that on Saturday she played the McCarter Theatre in Princeton and on Sunday afternoon the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. In addition, her future in-laws threw her and Donovan a surprise engagement shower after a performance.

On Monday, she says, she had a 5:30 a.m. pickup to get out to the North Bergen, N.J., set of “SVU” and because of the weekend’s excitement, she hadn’t slept a wink the night before. She filmed two scenes Monday, then was released and says that when she got home she just fell into bed dead asleep. Then she spent three hours on the phone with her sister, Alison--18 months younger and a film student at Columbia. Alison serves as both a confidant and career counselor, one of many Audra calls upon, and together the two went through the entire “SVU” script, helping Audra find her character.

Tuesday, however, McDonald seems relaxed and comfortable as well as a bit astonished when a costumer tells her that she’d left her sweater at the studio the day before. “What did I wear home?,” she says in her deep, throaty laugh. “I just hope I wasn’t walking around the city with my jacket and no shirt!”

If the story speaks of overload, you’d never know it from McDonald right now. Maybe she’s still acting, but she lies on the sofa, kicks back and makes you feel like she’s completely at home. Maybe she is. She’s been living out of dressing rooms her whole life, and the anonymity of this one is no different from any other.

She comes across as nice--responding graciously to any sort of question, always engaging those around her--which is not surprising because everyone says she genuinely is. And anyway, in Fresno she warned her audience, “Don’t think I went to New York and got angry. . . . When I moved to New York, I got teased for being friendly; I told them I’m from Fresno, and they seemed to understand.”

It’s a badge of honor, it seems, to maintain her inner-Fresno, to be the same gal who wore pigtails onstage as people munched and clinked their glasses, and who at 13 sang for Gov. George Deukmejian at a Holiday Inn ceremony in a $47 dress.

But the Audra McDonald of today is the result of work that began very early on. With dance lessons at age 3, piano lessons at 5, voice lessons at 9. Church choir, Junior Company Players (the children’s troupe of Fresno’s dinner theater Good Company Players) and, of course, a drive for academic excellence.

Audra’s mother is Anna J. McDonald, director of human resources and employment equity at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her father, Stanley McDonald, is a high school principal in Fresno. Her paternal grandmother was a gospel singer, and her aunts on that side of the family performed as a gospel group. Her maternal grandmother earned a bachelor’s in music from Chicago Musical College. Both of Audra McDonald’s parents emphasized education and would tolerate nothing but high standards from both daughters.

But young Audra was also spotted as being hyperactive, according to Anna McDonald, by a pre-kindergarten teacher. “She tended to want to have her way in a lot of ways, but also had lot of energy. So they said, ‘Why don’t you try to channel that energy in some productive way?’ I had started to teach her to play a few notes on the piano at age 3, to play a few little things. She was reading by the time she was 2 1/2. We just tried to keep her busy.”

From the start, Audra “was a natural,” her mother says, and she took to anything dramatic or musical that was offered to her. When other kids wanted to play, she was content to practice piano. When Audra was 9, her parents had a night out and went to see Good Company Players, the group Audra would soon join. The rest, as they say, is history.

There were stumbles. Her parents were selective about what roles she could play, and sometimes that hurt. “Show Boat” was out, because she was cast in a traditionally black role that her parents didn’t approve. And then there was “The Miracle Worker.”

“I got cast in ‘The Miracle Worker’ as a house girl, a sort of Uncle-Tom-type character,” McDonald remembers. “And my parents said, ‘No.’ I was upset, because I got cast, and that was a big deal. Now I know they were right.”

Dignity and ambition were key in the McDonald family. And it paid off. In 1984, in the first musical put on by Roosevelt School of the Arts, a performing arts magnet, Audra, a high school freshman, played the starring role in “Anything Goes.” A picture of her, stage center looking as grown up and composed as she does today, hangs in the school’s front office, a piece of theater history.

She also played the lead in “Evita” for Good Company Players at 16, a credit she still lists in her biography and a sign of the colorblind casting she would continue to pursue.

When it came time for college, Audra wanted to go to New York, to be able to audition, but her parents insisted that she earn a degree. They agreed on Juilliard, where McDonald was trained in classical singing, mostly opera. McDonald says she barely made it through, fighting the discipline the whole way. She wanted to do Broadway, to belt it out, and that was not the program. Soon after graduating in 1993, she joined the touring company of “The Secret Garden” and that same year made her Broadway debut in the show. And the next year she played “Carousel.”

*

With TV and concerts on the agenda, what else is left? Film, of course, but while she’s had featured roles in Nicholas Hytner’s “Object of My Affection” and Daryush Shokof’s “Seven Servants,” and a featured song in “Cradle Will Rock,” McDonald is not banking on Hollywood.

“If it’s the right role, I’d love to,” she says after some hesitation. “It’s hard sometimes, because there are a lot more stereotypes in film and TV. Not to slam television or to slam film, but you don’t see a huge variation of characters when it comes to African American women.”

McDonald says she now wants to do opera. Perhaps that’s not so unusual for someone who seems to want it all. She’s got concert performances planned of Kurt Weill’s “Seven Deadly Sins”--quasi-opera, quasi-cabaret--with John Mauceri and the Atlanta Symphony in Georgia later this month, Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., in September, and she plans to do it also with Zubin Mehta and the L.A. Philharmonic in Los Angeles Nov. 30-Dec. 2. But more serious opera is also a consideration.

Tilson Thomas says he has advised against McDonald’s operatic ambitions.

“I have been at the head of the list of people saying to her, ‘Why would somebody as original and talented as you want to sing opera?’ ” he says in a telephone conversation from Amsterdam. “Only because the possibilities of what she can do so transcend many of the limitations which the genre of opera can represent.

“In opera there are realms of the way this voice is compared to that voice, an obsession about what opera singers do. What is so wonderful about Audra is that she is going in a new direction and that everything she’s done is to create a repertoire which is specific to her. She doesn’t need to go into this arena to sing ‘La Sonambula’ in a way that people will compare it to Callas or anybody else. If she ever would decide to do that, the most exciting thing for all of us, for opera and for music, would be for her to say, ‘I’m going to totally reinvent what this piece might be about.’ ”

Given that McDonald is someone who says she always knows within four bars of a song if it’s something she wants to sing, someone who is drawn mostly to work that is either new or not well known, doing it her way is probably the only way she can go.

Just as she has no real role models today, there were few role models for a black actress growing up in the 1970s and early ‘80s. McDonald cites Cicely Tyson, Diana Ross and Maya Angelou as influences, as well as Sarah Vaughan and Lena Horne. Now she’s one herself.

“Going out on the road, I’ve met a lot of college students and high school students who’ve come up to me and said, ‘You’re my Judy Garland,’ ” McDonald says, a point of some pride because Garland is one of her own heroes. (“I’m a gay man trapped inside a black woman’s body,” she told the Fresno audience.)

“One girl said, ‘I always wanted to be on Broadway, and my mom said, “There’re no blacks on Broadway,” and then you came along and I said, “There’s one, there’s one!” ’ “

Given her own experiences, McDonald says she feels some responsibility to guide these young aspirants. “I always say, if there’s a role you think you can play, go for it. You don’t need to put the limitations on yourself. Lord knows everybody else will. So you might as well be in your own corner. Learn the role anyway, get on stage wherever you can.

“If I end up influencing kids to have more trust in themselves, and more faith in themselves that they can do it, then that’s a great thing.”