Audra McDonald’s Sweet Soprano
FROM THE MOMENT the first three notes resounded in Gaillard Auditorium Thursday night, we knew: Now, this is a voice! It belonged to Audra McDonald, the sensational star of the second presentation in the Charleston Concert Association’s six-event 75th season.
Not only can this beautiful lady sing, she has won accolades for her work as both singer and actress on Broadway, on opera stages, in films and on television, with a major career as a concert and recording artist.
Her many and varied gifts ensured an exciting, unusual, and highly polished performance. She endeared herself to the audience with not simply patter between a wide range of selections from musical theater, but stories from her heart. Following her opening “When Did I Fall in Love?”—an ideal vehicle for her luminous soprano—she allowed as how she was “mighty impressed” with our Holy City, words we dearly love to hear. While I thought most of her program would consist of familiar tunes, she presented an eclectic mix of songs from blockbuster musicals, Big Numbers such as “Stars and the Moon” from less well-known shows, and popular compositions from the 1920s forward.
Sitting on a stool at the mic, or standing and gesturing in a way entirely natural to her, changing lighting effects and her trio’s highly accomplished accompaniment made every second of this concert intriguing, unpredictable, charming. This past summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she played Bess in the controversial “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” she encountered a man in his eighties surrounded by vintage movie posters with a sign, “Be kind to street people.” He sang one of her all-time favorite songs, written shortly after WWI, and McDonald’s version of the soulful “My Buddy” she sang in the same key as the old gentleman, with profound sincerity and depth.
With her musical director Andy Einhorn on piano, Mark Vanderpoel on bass, and Gene Lewin on drums, all of whom have credentials nearly as impressive as McDonald’s, we were treated to a roller-coaster ride of everything from “I Double Dare You” to Irving Berlin and Stephen Sondheim signature greats, to what she termed art songs.
In a striking black-and-white figured one-strap gown, McDonald sang without intermission for over 90 minutes, continuing to share pieces of her life. Her father, a high school principal, passed away four years ago in the crash of an airplane he was piloting, and she honored him with a song about flight she played at the piano herself, alone on stage.
Another highlight became an audience sing-along as she launched into “I Could Have Danced All Night.” She insisted she was now too old to play Eliza, plus the song is “too popular,” sung by too many chanteuses, “including Julie Andrews and Nathan Lane in drag,” but her classic voice sounded exactly right for this gem as she playfully ended with a note in the coloratura range.
While she received classical vocal training, completing “a four-year program in five years” at Juilliard, she kept telling them, “I wanna belt, I wanna mix!” Her versions of lieder were nothing like you’ve ever heard before, a very long way from Schubert or Mozart or Mahler song cycles, by a composer who found his collaborator on Craig’s List. The opening line, “You looked sexy even though you were having a seizure” popped along to a repetition of “neurotica-lonely” with the men joining in using falsetto voice in phrases about sandwiches and relish, ending with “If anyone knows what I’m talking about, please tell me, it’s driving me crazy.”
When her daughter Zoe Madeline, now 10, was three years old, she refused to let her mother sing her lullabies. “Mommy, your singing makes my ears cry,” she protested. So she sang her lullabies to us: From the musical version of “Raisin in the Sun,” Ruth’s answer to her son asking for fifty cents was a revelation, as was a simple, sweet lullaby from her favorite Disney movie about her favorite animal.
Not for long did we dwell in sentiment, as McDonald spit out a manic, letter-perfect version of Frank Loesser’s “I Can’t Stop Talking About Him” from the movie musical, “Let’s Dance!” On to a song from a recent short-lived minstrel show that people did not understand was performed by African-Americans as men jailed on false charges, who want to go home. Another moving composition from “Ordinary Thing,” a musical based on 9/11, led straight to a couple oldies, including Harold Arlen’s “Make Someone Happy” from the 1954 movie “Life is Short.”
Being in the South reminds her —and us —of the contributions of the women who made it possible for her to appear tonight, among them Billie Holiday, Ruby Dee and the late, great, Lena Horne, in whose honor she belted out, “Ain’t It the Truth.” A rousing standing O brought her back to the stage for a song she does not sing in concert, but for Charleston “Summertime” is ideally suited, as were all her songs to her classically-trained “classic voice” that remains so natural an instrument.
Audra McDonald entertains at an extraordinary level of versatility, and while the moon was full, the Gaillard Auditorium was not, which is a downright shame.
