Six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald will perform in Ann Arbor on Sunday
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Six-time Tony Award winning singer, actress and activist Audra McDonald will perform at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium on Sunday, April 23. The 4 p.m. matinee performance will feature songs and stories from the veteran performer and 2015 National Medal of the Arts recipient.
Along with her iconic Broadway work, the charismatic soprano is recognized from recent roles on such international hits as “The Good Fight” (Paramount+/CBS), which aired its final season last year, and “The Gilded Age,” a still-growing HBO drama that also features “Good Fight” co-star and fellow Tony winner Christine Baranski.
Fans and Broadway lovers have asked for years when McDonald would return to the stage for a new musical. She confessed to the Free Press that she currently has two projects in workshop mode and is “very excited” about them.
“I’m very much looking forward to doing a musical again soon,” McDonald said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
For Sunday’s University Musical Society performance, the “Ragtime” and “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” chanteuse said she’ll perform “songs from the musical theater canon … from anywhere in the 1920s all the way up to songs written fairly recently.” She mentioned that the program includes numbers by the Gershwins and Stephen Sondheim.
“As the years have progressed,” McDonald said, “I’ve found that I’ve been going to material that (includes) more iconic songs that have been very much associated with iconic roles in the musical theater canon. Songs that I’ve stayed away from in the past, for fear that I would not be able to do them justice. And as I am now in my fifth decade of life, I realized that I’m now more interested in my own particular take on something as opposed to making sure that it lived up to some standard.
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“And now, the standard is: ‘Well, how would I sing this song?’”
McDonald said audiences can count on “a lot of very, very familiar, iconic songs” during Sunday’s performance.
“I teach a lot of students,” she said. “When I work with them, I say, ‘Don’t say no to yourself. There’s enough people in the world that will say that to you—don’t you be one of them.’ And so I’m taking my own advice now, and trusting that what I bring to the song will be enough.”
Contact Free Press arts and culture reporter Duante Beddingfield at dbeddingfield@freepress.com.
Audra McDonald
Hill Auditorium, 825 North University Ave., Ann Arbor
Tickets starting at $14
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tony Award winner Audra McDonald to perform in Ann Arbor on Sunday
