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Four-time Tony Award® winner Audra McDonald brings her usual flood of talent to the role of Lizzie Curry for Roundabout's revival of 110 in the Shade.
An interview by Randy Gener
Audra McDonald was still in grade school when she was cast in her first musical, as one of the royal princesses in The King and I. She was so young that she was excused from late-night rehearsals; as a result, she had no clue what happened at the end of the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic–until the final dress rehearsal, in front of an audience. “So the king dies,” she recalls. “And I'm sitting there, next to his bed, with all the other little princesses, and I broke down in tears. It was my first cognizant moment onstage, and I was watching myself have an actual real reaction.”
Many years later, McDonald is still royalty: the reigning queen of Broadway, a four-time Tony® winner for acting both in plays and musicals, and starring in Roundabout's revival of the Harvey Schmidt–Tom Jones musical, 110 in the Shade, based on The Rainmaker by N. Richard Nash (which Roundabout audiences saw in 2000). She arrived at the top of her profession by making a staggering display out of her emotional risk-taking–so adept at creating “real reactions” no matter the role. She can do gawky sweet (Carrie in Carousel), raw nerves (Sharon in Master Class) or formidable, angry, and emotionally urgent (Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun, Lady Percy in Henry IV, the title role in Marie Christine). Her Juilliard-trained lyric soprano sails across boundaries and genres, navigating pop songs and Broadway standards as easily as art songs and opera arias. She's recorded four solo CDs for Nonesuch Records (her latest is called Build a Bridge), but the title of her second comes closest to describing her emotional openness-How Glory Goes.
One half hour before a morning rehearsal for 110 in the Shade, in which she plays the part of Lizzie Curry, a plain and lonely woman convinced that she is going to be an old maid in a drought-stricken Western town, McDonald lounges on a studio couch. Inside the rehearsal room, the romantic strains of the number “Everything Beautiful Happens at Night” build to a rolling crescendo. At one point, cast member Elisa Van Duyne sashays into the room. McDonald doesn't miss a comic beat: “Elisa here is playing Lily Ann Beasley. She's Lizzie's idea of what it is to be feminine.” Van Duyne responds, “I'm the town flirt!” McDonald delivers the punch line: “Yes, she's the town bike. Everyone has had a ride.” After a good laugh, McDonald, dressed in a lavender shirt and simple jeans, continues her conversation with Front & Center about her first Broadway musical in seven years.
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Audra McDonald as Lizzie.
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FRONT & CENTER: 110 in the Shade seems such a musical chestnut. How did you become involved in this production?
Director Lonny Price has loved this piece for a long time. Three years ago he said to me, “I think I have a project that will be right for you.” He gave me a cd of the show, and I didn't like it at first. Lonny said, “No, read the play and really listen.” I did, and I went, “Oh... [in a dramatic tone] ...oh, I love this.” He then got Roundabout to help us; we had two workshops. Roundabout committed to the project and gave us time for another workshop.
The musical first opened in 1963. Are you trying to approach the material with different perspectives or a new interpretation?
No, we're not trying to reinvent the musical at all. We're just trying to introduce it to a whole new generation. We're just telling the story.
The show has been tweaked to point out that the issue is not that Lizzie was the only plain-looking person in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The issue is that Lizzie doesn't have feminine influences in her life. Her mother is no longer alive. She basically has no filter: she says what she thinks–and states it quite plainly: “I want a man to stand up to me and I want to stand up straight to him. Why shouldn't that be possible in a relationship?” That's a very modern way of thinking in that time. She shoots off her mouth, and that's where she ends up in a lot of trouble–whereas if she were a man, people would say, “Oh, she just has strong opinions.”
Honestly, you are a beautiful woman. I have difficulty thinking of Audra McDonald as “plain-looking” onstage.
You know, we can have a conversation with my therapist about that. People can say what they want. My feeling is: I have never thought of myself as a beautiful person. I have thought of myself as someone who has gone by my talent and my wit. That's what I think Lizzie feels like, too. She knows she's smart. She knows she's a good homemaker. She knows she's good at conversation. She knows she's all of those things.
As for me, I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in Fresno, California, and went to a predominantly white school. My obsession was that I didn't look like everybody else. I had real issues about my looks; I think we carry those issues.
And the part was not conceived for a black person. Speaking as a person of color, I feel we should be able to see through the color of the skin, yet sometimes you can't escape it. It must strike you as funny when Lizzie Curry in the song “Raunchy” says that she's going to throw peroxide in her hair.
We make a joke about it. The whole song is such a joke anyway–obviously this is not something she's going to do. She's making fun of these women, so it's ripe for us to make joke about it. (Laughs) I understand Lizzie Curry. You can't tell me that there were not black people in Oklahoma and Texas in the 1930s; that's just not true.
Besides, that's not what this story is about. This is about a woman desperate for love but also steadfast in her belief that she's not about to change who she is to find it. She's at a major crossroads–and she's desperate. She's someone who gets by on her wit and her talent, not necessarily on her looks; that's something I understand. That's what's most interesting. The music sits really well in my voice; it feels like a good match. In my mind, there's no reason why I shouldn't play this part.
Look, I'm getting ready to do an opera at the end of next year, where I'm playing Kitty Oppenheimer [the wife of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the New York premiere of John Adams' Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera]. That's serious color-blind casting. We know exactly what she looks like, and we know exactly what she did with her life. So 110 in the Shade should not be a leap for people. It's an incredible journey that Lizzie takes. It's a character I'll be able to inhabit.
“I have thought of myself as someone who has
gone by my talent and wit. That's what I think
Lizzie feels like too.”
I want to throw out some adjectives that have been used to describe Lizzie: “lonely,” “sure,” “likeable,” “well educated,” “awkward,” “outspoken,” “sympathetic”… maybe even… “pathetic”?
Lizzie is all of those things. It's interesting that you hesitated to say “pathetic.” She does have some very pathetic moments in this show. In an absolute desperate state, she resorts to the kind of behavior she hates most–feminine wiles, what it takes to get a man–and it's just a car wreck. I'm sure other people have played this moment differently: “Oh, let's make people laugh.” But you should not want to even look at it. At the same time, you should not be able to tear your eyes from it. Lizzie's resorted to something that is just so beneath her; it's so not who she is.
110 in the Shade is really Lizzie's journey. Starbuck [the fast-talking traveler who claims he can break the town's drought] is a catalyst for that journey. As a result, other people's lives are changed. Starbuck actually has true validation that maybe he does make it rain, both metaphorically and literally. Lizzie's brothers, Jim and Noah, have a big journey. Sheriff File [the local sheriff, considered the town's most eligible bachelor] has a huge journey from being completely cut off from the world to being able to speak up and say, “No, Lizzie. Stay with me.” That's huge–huge! All that happens in one bloody hot day–and it happens to Lizzie. Let's not beat around the bush: She starts out the day thinking that she'll never ever, ever, ever find love, and by the end of the day not only has she been proposed to twice, but she's lost her virginity at age 30. Lonny and I joke, “It's Lizie's big day.”
Performing a musical must be radically different from a concert situation, where you can really tear into a song or swing with it. In that sense is a show like this confining or liberating?
In some ways it is confining. You're confined to specific blockings, a specific script, and you've got other people on stage with you. There's a fourth wall. In another sense, concert work is lonely–it's just you. I've got my band, of course–an incredible group of musicians and orchestrator Ted Sperling, who is a genius in my eyes–but when I'm doing concert work, the only other person who can hit the ball back in a creative way is the audience. With this show, I'm being fulfilled in a whole other way. The dynamic is constantly changing by the sheer fact that there are other bodies, other emotions and other energies up there.
Are Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones underrated as composers?
Everybody knows The Fantasticks and thinks it's brilliant. This musical is incredibly underrated. The music is absolutely gorgeous, Copland-esque and rhapsodic. “Old Maid” is a female version of “My Boy Bill,” Billy's “soliloquy” from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel. It is Lizzie's chance to have this soliloquy. Our show is just as relevant, beautiful, and touching as The Fantasticks. 110 in the Shade just offers people a chance to hear another fantastic Schmidt/Jones work.
Randy Gener, the senior editor of American Theatre, is the author of the plays Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Pieces.
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