David Remnick: 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, and 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 Schulman.

Michael Shulman: Audra, thanks so much for being here. I know you're deep in rehearsal.

Audra McDonald: Yes, we're in week four of rehearsals right now.

Michael Shulman: How's it going? What did you guys do today?

Audra McDonald: [laughs] We started the day working on Everything's Coming Up Roses, and then after lunch, we did Rose's Turn, so that's how my day's gone today. [music -- Audra McDonald -- Everything's Coming Up Roses]

Some people can't even give it away.

This people's got it and this people

Michael Shulman: That's intense.

Audra McDonald: It's very intense, yes.

Michael Shulman: Wow. Has this been a long dream of yours, goal of yours to play Rose, or was it something that came up more recently? How did this start for you?

Audra McDonald: Was it a long time dream of mine? No. It's a show that I obviously grew up knowing and loving. I was in it in my dinner theater in Fresno, California. I played one of Uncle Jocko's kiddies. I've seen the few iterations that I've been able to see. Obviously in the movie, the TV movie. It really was a Thanksgiving dinner that I had probably about six years ago, and the late, great Gavin Creel, who's a very, very dear friend of ours, very, very, very. We were very close to him, and we usually spent Thanksgivings together. And he was there and he said, "Oh, I want to talk to you about something." Then he pulled me into the garage. He's like, "Here, come here, come here, come here. You need to play Rose in Gypsy. You got to do it. You just got to do it. Can you imagine, a Black woman? It has to be you. You got to do it. You got to do it." I was like, "What? You're crazy."

He's like, "You have to do this. You have to do this." I was like, "That's interesting. Yes, I could see how maybe it could be played by a Black woman. Yes, that'd be a real challenge. Then just conversations started and Stephen Sondheim was obviously still alive at the time. He was very supportive of the idea and said yes. Then we started down that long road, and it just took a long time for it all to come together, timing and whatnot.

Michael Shulman: Then, once you talked to Stephen Sondheim about it, what was that conversation like? Was it like you needed his blessing? How does that work?

Audra McDonald: Sondheim, another one that I miss terribly. He's always been an incredible teacher and supporter. Very supportive in my career. Has always offered suggestions and ideas. He would come to all my shows and just be supportive, and whenever I was in any sort of performance involving his music, he was there and had his thoughts. [laughs] I just felt very supported by him, and so when it was brought up to him, he thought it was a great idea.

He said, "I think that's terrific." Actually, there was another show of his, too, that he wanted me to be a part of as well. I was like, "Well, is it okay if we do this one first?" He's like, "Whichever one you want to do first, that's fine with me." [laughs]

Michael Shulman: What's the other one?

[laughter]

Audra McDonald: A Little Night Music. Maybe someday I'll do that. [laughs]

Michael Shulman: We'll be there. [laughs]

Audra McDonald: Let me get this one out of the way first.

Michael Shulman: One thing that's always struck me about Gypsy is that she's lived this whole life before the show starts, and we don't know a ton about it. She mentions that she's been married three times.

Audra McDonald: Three times.

Michael Shulman: Obviously, she has two kids, and presumably, she had some dreams that were thwarted because she's ranting and raving about them at the end. Do you, as part of this process, create a backstory for her? Is that important to you or is it just like curtain up and she's a moving train?

Audra McDonald: Oh, no, no, no, you have to. The great thing about Gypsy is while it's based on the real life story of Gypsy Rose Lee, it is very specifically on the libretto, the only way they were able to legally actually do it because June Havoc almost tried to stop Arthur Lawrence and Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim because she wasn't happy with the way she was being depicted in the show. The way that they were able to legally get beyond that was to call this a musical fable, and so it's suggested by her history. Obviously, I start with that as source material. You have to.

Then I sort of build in, "Okay, she can still be from Seattle." Of course, there were Black people in Seattle then. [laughs] There's enough actual history that I can then use based on Rose's life and what I know about life for Black people at that time as well, and bring that into the story, too. It's not saying, "oh, we have to make believe that there were Black people performing in vaudeville at this time. We have to make-believe that there were Black people in Seattle. There were Black people who ended up becoming strippers," or any of that. We don't have to make believe. It actually happened, it actually existed, and so it's embodied. I will say we're not changing a single solitary line in the show. Not a single solitary one. There's no need, and some of them actually hit [chuckles] in a different way.

Michael Shulman: Really?

Audra McDonald: When you think about some of the lines coming out of a Black woman, they hit in a different way in 2024.

Michael Shulman: When this show was announced earlier in the summer, there qas this John McWhorter op-ed in the New York Times that, first of all, I can't think of another example of a New York Times column taking issue with a Broadway production months before it's gone into rehearsal. It was about this question of rethinking Rose as a Black character. He wrote, "Rose isn't just being played by a Black actress. She's being played, it seems, as a Black character. This is off for a few reasons. One is historical. In 1920s America, when the show is set, racism and segregation remained implacable forces in popular culture and the only stardom a Black Rose would have realistically sought for her kids would have been among Black audiences."

He says, "Colorblind casting has become common, even fashionable, and that's a wonderful thing," but then he says, "Recoding characters-- at least historical characters- as Black, just because Black people are playing them is just another kind of denial of racism." I mean, this is John McWhorter, the Black intellectual speculating about what it might be like. If you want to rebut this column, you are welcome to, but I'm curious about what conversations have been sparked with George, with the people putting on the show about how do you square things that don't historically maybe line up in a literal way?

Audra McDonald: It's a musical fable.

[laughter]

[applause]

Michael Shulman: [laughs]

Audra McDonald: That's all I got. I have a lot more, but that's all I'll say. It's a musical fable. It's a fable. How do you square that people just burst into song?

[laughter]

[applause]

Audra McDonald: Look, I mean, I have dealt with this my entire career, people upset with me for that I was playing Carrie in Carousel, saying, "Well, she wouldn't have been Black," and da, da, da. There's a man who comes down from heaven with a star in his hand.

[laughter]

Audra McDonald: People who are going to want to come and see the show and take the journey with us can take the journey. Those who want to intellectualize and make it about something else can do that, too, but that's what we're doing. We're telling the story.

[applause]

Michael Shulman: Amen. Well, you brought up Carousel, which I think was a moment when you really burst into a lot of people's awareness. How old were you when you did Carousel?

Audra McDonald: I was 23.

Michael Shulman: It was right out of Juilliard. It was like a year or so?

Audra McDonald: Yes.

Michael Shulman: It was such a rapid rise. You won a Tony Award very young. Had you been auditioning and stuff before then, waiting tables? What was it like the moment before that like?

Audra McDonald: Yes, I had gone to Juilliard because I was from Fresno and I wanted to be on Broadway. I've known that I wanted to be on Broadway since I was 9. I moved to New York and I went to Juilliard because they accepted me, but I auditioned in the vocal department instead of in the acting department was probably what I should have done, but I just thought, "Well, I have a strong voice, so I'll do that." What I underestimated was how much I would be shoved in the classical direction vocally. I wasn't really given the opportunity to take acting lessons, to take movement or diction like all the other acting students at Juilliard were doing.

Actually, I was in school with Viola Davis. She was there at the same time as well.

Michael Shulman: Oh, my [unintelligible 00:09:51]

Audra McDonald: Other really wonderful people, but I was stuck. I was watching them do this and I wasn't, and here I was in New York at Juilliard. My address was literally Broadway, and I had never felt so far away from my goal, which was Broadway, so I left school. I like to joke that I did the four-year program in five years. I left Juilliard for a little while because I just couldn't handle it anymore. One of the things I ended up doing while I was taking some time off was I auditioned for things and I got into the touring company of The Secret Garden, and so I went on the road with that.

Then I came back and did the last two months of Secret Garden on Broadway and finished school at the same time. Then from that, I went back out on the road, and I got an agent. My agent said, "We've got this audition for you for Carousel."

[music -- Audra McDonald -- Mr. Snow ]

When I marry Mr. Snow. Then it's off to home we'll go,

and both of us will look a little dreamy-eyed.

David Remnick: Audra McDonald singing a bit from Carousel, and she's talking with the New Yorker's Michael Shulman. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. [music]

David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Recently, at the New Yorker Festival, the celebrated actress and singer Audra McDonald talked with our staff writer, Michael Schulman. We'll return to that conversation now. Here's Michael Shulman.

Michael Shulman: I mean, how much of a plan did you have because your career has, in some ways, been totally unprecedented in a couple of ways? When you were a kid in Fresno doing theater, how much of a roadmap did you have for yourself about being a Broadway leading lady?

Audra McDonald: I wasn't even thinking leading lady. I was a little Black girl from Fresno, nine years old, in dinner theater, got to be Uncle Jocko's kitty. I was a kid in the ensemble of Hello Dolly. They cast me when I was 16 to play Eva Peron in Evita at the local dinner theater, which was a big scandal because they double-cast the role. The other woman was a 23 or 24 year old white woman, and so this is Fresno, land of like-

Michael Shulman: Devin Nunes.

Audra McDonald: Devin Nunes. Yes, right. People would call the box office and say, "Is the Black or the white one on tonight?" I'm not even kidding. In my estimation, I just wanted to be on Broadway. I just wanted to do theater and I wanted to be on Broadway and I didn't care what I did. As long as I got to be on Broadway, that was the goal.

Michael Shulman: Gypsy is-- among many other things- a show about motherhood, about being a parent. I'm curious about how your parents guided your early interest in acting and theater.

Audra McDonald: It was guided primarily as a means of to be therapy for me because I was hyperactive child who was having a lot of problems in school, not socializing well, considered very overdramatic [chuckles]-

[laughter]

Audra McDonald: -but not functioning well. They were told, "Let's try Ritalin." This was 1976, '77, "Let's try Ritalin." My parents thought "No, we don't want to." I'm not judging anybody who does do it, my parents weren't either. They just said, "We don't think that's right for our girl," but they knew that I liked to sing. They had gone to see a show at this dinner theater and said, "Why don't you go and audition for that?" and that lit me up.

Michael Shulman: I believe there was a role that they actually told you not to take when you were little.

Audra McDonald: Yes. The dinner theater had their main stage where they would have the musicals, and then they had a smaller stage where they would do plays called the Second Space. They were doing the Miracle Worker. And I auditioned and got cast as the servant Black girl, slave girl. I don't think she's a slave, but she's just a servant girl in the Miracle Worker. I guess I just went and auditioned without telling my parents, whatever. When I got cast, they said, "You will absolutely not be playing that role. Absolutely not." I was upset. They said, "You'll understand when you're older, but we don't want you doing that," and so they put their foot down. I understand it. I understand why they did that.

My parents were educators. My dad ended up being associate superintendent of schools in Fresno, California before he retired. My mom worked at California State University for years. I remember trying to watch Little Rascals, and they were like, "No, no, no, no, no, you're not watching that." Pride in who I was and pride in being a Black person and not demeaning myself in a society that sought to demean and separate and other Black people was something they were very, very adamant about making sure that I had pride in myself in that way. No, I remember thinking about trying to audition for Showboat as well, and they were like, [chuckles] "You ain't doing that. You can do anything, not that."

I mean, again, wonderful musical, but my parents were like, "You don't need to do that."

Michael Shulman: There's a Sondheim song that you've claimed over the years, the Glamorous Life from A Little Night Music.

Audra McDonald: [singing] Ordinary mothers lead ordinary lives

Keep the house and sweep the parlor

Mend the clothes and tend the children

Ordinary mothers like ordinary wives

make the beds and bake the pies and wither on

Michael Shulman: It's not even the Glamorous Life that's in the show. It's like the secret one that was in the movie-

Audra McDonald: In the movie, right.

Michael Shulman: -that no one ever talks about [chuckles] Elizabeth Taylor. It's the inverse of Gypsy. It's not a stage mother driving her children in show business. It's a child whose mother is a great star and she sings about how she wishes. Her mother's off living the glamorous life, but you can tell, even though she doesn't realize that she's longing for her mom.

Audra McDonald: Yes.

Michael Shulman: Why did that song become your go-to song for so many things?

Audra McDonald: I think a couple reasons, but the main one is because I am a mother of two girls. I also have two stepsons, and I am that mom that is sometimes off, not necessarily leading what I call the glamorous life. For me, my life gets glamorous when I get to be home with my family. Sometimes I feel very guilty about being gone and being away, so the song speaks to those fears for me and what my children might actually think or feel in terms of wanting and needing me and missing me and not having me there. I sing that song as [chuckles] therapy for my fears, I guess.

Michael Shulman: Well, I'm sure it's also a way of projecting to them like, "I see you. I understand what this might be like to have, not just a performing mom, but it's a theater household."

Audra McDonald: It's a theater household.

Michael Shulman: A two-parent theater household, actor household.

Audra McDonald: Yes. I have to say my youngest one is most because our other kids are a product. My husband is an actor, Will Swensen and our kids from our other marriage is a product of one performer and then someone who's not a performer. Our little one, poor thing, that's just a child of performers DNA coming in on both sides. Our little one, who just turned eight a couple days ago, we were at a get together and a friend of mine was also at this get together and he's also in Gypsy. We were getting ready to start rehearsals and he went up to Sally and he's like, "I'm going to be working with your mom in Gypsy," and he said, "Is there anything? What do you want to tell me?"

She said, "Well, first of all, she's got a lot of vibrato."

[laughter]

[applause]

David Remnick: Audra McDonald on stage at the New Yorker Festival, and she's starring in the revival of Gypsy, which is opening on Broadway. She spoke with the New Yorker's Michael Schulman.

[music -- Audra McDonald -- Careful What You Say]

What do you leave to your child when you're dead?

Only whatever you put in its head.

Things that your father and mother had said.

Which were left to them, too. Careful what you say.

 

 

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