Audra McDonald, 52, can’t recall a time before she was an ally to the 2SLGBTQ+ communities.Autumn de Wilde/Supplied
When Audra McDonald began performing in dinner theatre in Fresno, Calif., at age nine, her parents, who both worked in education, wouldn’t let her audition for certain roles: a slave girl in The Miracle Worker, for example, or one of the kids who adds “atmosphere” to the song Old Man River in Showboat. She was upset about it, but they stood firm. “You don’t need to perpetuate those stereotypes,” they told her. “There are other things you can do.”
“I don’t judge anyone who takes those parts,” McDonald made clear in a recent phone interview from her woodsy home in upstate New York. “But my parents purposefully put me on a different path.”
That path turned out to be a blaze of light. A thrilling lyric soprano voice. A Julliard degree in 1993. Three Tony Awards by age 28, and another three afterward. (That’s more performance wins than any other actor – and she’s the only person to win in all four acting categories.) One Emmy and two Grammy wins, and the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by then-U.S. president Barack Obama to McDonald when she was hugely pregnant. (White House staff assured her they had excellent doctors standing by in case she went into labour.) Starring roles in operas, in the series The Gilded Age, The Good Wife and The Good Fight, and as Billie Holiday on Broadway. Plus a legacy of activism for equal rights in all its iterations.
That activist legacy is the reason that the 519 – a Toronto agency that supports 2SLGBTQ+ communities with trauma-informed counselling, newcomer and refugee aid, food security initiatives, legal services and early child and family care – asked McDonald to host their 18th annual fundraising gala at the Ritz-Carlton on April 30, where John Irving will receive the first-ever 519 Ally Award.
McDonald, 52, can’t recall a time before she was an ally to those communities; she was raised in them. “But I guess I got really vocal during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, when marriage equality was struck down in the States,” she says. “I was horrified and furious and wanted to be more public in my support, so people understand this is a civil rights issue. As someone from a community that’s benefited from civil rights, it’s necessary that I keep up the fight.
“As a Black kid growing up in the U.S., it’s a part of daily life to learn about injustices,” she continues. “Black parents must teach their children to move safely in a society that looks at you and immediately judges.”
In the 1990s, Broadway’s nickname, the Great White Way, aptly described the majority of its stars and audiences. But McDonald had a guiding philosophy: “Other people will say no to you, but you say yes to yourself.” That meant looking blankly at casting directors who asked her to “act more street” or sing in a “sassier” way. Some people turned her down. “But sometimes they said yes, and a door got opened, and then I was the one who held that door open.”
It meant auditioning for roles she thought she was right for, regardless of tradition. Carrie Pipperidge in Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel is “not usually played by a young, hyperactive Black woman,” McDonald says, laughing. But she was the first Black woman to win the role in a major Broadway production, in the 1994 revival directed by Nicholas Hytner. (It was her first Tony award.)
“When a white woman comes on stage, you wonder what she’ll sound like,” McDonald says. “But a lot of the stereotyping that happens within theatre is that many people assume, ‘Here comes a Black lady, she’s going to have a belty gospel voice.’ Well, a lot of Black women do have incredible gospel voices, and a lot of Black women have beautiful soprano or contralto voices, because we are not one thing. We are as three-dimensional and multi-faceted as anybody, and I hope I am pushing the envelope so people see us as that.”
McDonald is currently touring a concert of iconic tunes, many from the great American musical theatre songbook – Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, Jerry Herman, Duke Ellington. She’s played Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium, and on Nov. 2 she’ll be at Roy Thomson Hall with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. As with her role as Liz, the outspoken attorney on The Good Fight, McDonald does not shy away from mixing politics into her performances. “Art is a way to reach people,” she says. “In my concerts, I centre humanity, and I make sure everyone is included in that.”
When she sings It’s Not Easy Being Green, with its message, “I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful,” she dedicates it to anyone who feels othered. When she sings Jule Styne’s Being Good Isn’t Good Enough, in which a Black woman recognizes that “I must fly extra high,” she talks about the prejudices that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had to endure in her nomination hearings. When she sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow, she celebrates the freedom to love and marry whom we choose. And when she sings Irving Berlin, she pointedly notes that an immigrant wrote God Bless America.
“If I lose audience members as a result of that, then I’m willing to lose them,” McDonald says. “I’m not willing to lose my moral code and who I am and where I sit in the human race in order to please certain audience members.”
The spectre of Donald Trump running again for president – and of people supporting him regardless of what he stands for – is one she finds “maddening and enraging. I try to be as vocal and activated as possible against that hate and the danger it holds for marginalized people.” But she finds hope in her children, who are 6 and 22.
“That generation that’s coming into their own and starting to vote, they’re not putting up with it,” she says. “They are not asleep. They are aware. They understand dog whistles, and they are organizing and running for office. Lord knows I hoped we wouldn’t burden them with this. But I do have faith in them.”
McDonald’s current concerts represent her own evolution, too. “When I was starting out, I’d think, ‘Judy or Barbra or Lena sang that song, and I can’t sing like her,’ or ‘I have to sing it like her,’” she says, referring of course to Garland, Streisand and Horne. “I’m not afraid to try the songs my way now. I’m at a point where I think, ‘They sang it, and they sang it like them. And now I’m going to sing it, and I’m going to sing it like me.’”
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