Audra McDonald Is Our Greatest Living Stage Actor

Time​ Magazine

7 days ago

If you happen to take your eyes off the stage during the first few minutes of Gypsy on Broadway, and turn instead to the aisle, you'll see a woman standing alone in the dark. She's in a velvet coat, holding a small dog, her face contorted into a grimace of ambition so fierce it looks something like rage, her eyes focused on the children dancing onstage as her hands twitch to the beat of the music. At first, nobody notices her, even though she is Audra McDonald, arguably the greatest living stage actor, even though she is already in character as Mama Rose, the most famous and reviled stage mother in musical theater. Then, she calls out her first line ('Sing out, Louise!') and every head turns in unison. She is the person they have come to see, and she had been standing there next to them all along.
'Rose snuck in,' she tells me, leaning back on a cushioned chair in her dressing room, four hours before curtain. Her hair, prepped for her wig, is tucked under a baseball cap, and she is wearing comfy clothes before getting into costume. 'When all the rest of the mothers have been kicked out, she snuck in, went in front, checked out what was going on. She's already miles ahead when the show starts.'
The same could be said, in some sense, of McDonald. After rumors of her casting spread last year— 'You know, people talk, people talk,' she said —the announcement was met with excitement and anticipation. And since the show opened in December, she's been garnering widespread praise, with at least one critic having a 'spiritual epiphany.'
'When you talk about Greta Garbo, you think of that face. When you think about Ethel Merman, you hear that voice,' says Christine Baranski, who worked with McDonald on The Good Fight and The Gilded Age. 'With Audra, it's that lustrous presence.'
Gypsy is a musical fable that follows Mama Rose's relentless pursuit of fame for her daughters throughout Depression-era America, resulting in her losing one, June, altogether and pushing the other, Louise, to become the burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. It's a show about the American Dream, or, more precisely, it's a show about a mother's American Dream, one that for most of history could be expressed only through her children. The show, with its famed music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is frequently referred to as the King Lear of Broadway, and Mama Rose is one of the meatiest roles available to a performer. 'This is the Shakespeare of a musical theater woman's career,' says Norm Lewis, who co-starred with McDonald in The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, for which she won her fifth Tony. 'This is the pinnacle.'
She's been played by luminaries like Ethel Merman, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, Angela Lansbury, and Patti LuPone in the past, but until now, Mama Rose had never been played on Broadway by a Black actor. If anybody was going to do it, it was going to be McDonald. (LuPone's representative said the actor was "going to pass" on commenting for this story.)
McDonald is like the Meryl Streep of theater, except McDonald has more Tonys than Streep has Oscars. McDonald holds the record for most Tonys ever won by a performer, and is the only person to have a Tony in all four acting categories. And when her 11th nomination was announced on May 1, she officially became the most Tony-nominated performer in history, at just 54 years old.
And yet McDonald's record-breaking performance comes at a unique moment for American theater. More and more audiences seem to be coming to Broadway to see shows and actors they recognize from their screens. The biggest shows are still the old standbys— Wicked, The Lion King —and some of the buzziest productions boast Hollywood names. Even as McDonald's Mama Rose puts theatergoers in seats— Gypsy took in a respectable $1,891,769 in its highest-grossing week in January—it's still the TV and movie stars who are bringing the big money to Broadway. Othello, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, raked in $2,818,297 during a week in previews, making it the top-grossing play in Broadway history, only to be topped by George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, which in May became the first Broadway show to exceed $4 million in a week. Glengarry Glen Ross, featuring Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk, also crossed the $2 million mark.
All of this makes McDonald's dominance even more remarkable; at a time when theater seems like it's being consumed by celebrity, her career represents a commitment to the old-fashioned principles of artistry. 'She has some ability to access the rawest and most visceral emotional life and continue to sing,' says Diane Paulus, who directed her in The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess. 'That's what's mind-blowing.'
McDonald can walk down the street without being recognized, and she's mostly able to live her life without being accosted by fans. When audiences arrive at the Majestic Theatre, they're not coming to see her because she's famous, they're not there to take a photo or breathe the same air as a movie star; they're there to witness her raw talent. 'It's not, Oh, let's look at this perfect object,' says Gypsy director George C. Wolfe, who also directed McDonald in Shuffle Along as well as the movie Rustin. Her talent 'makes an audience feel compelled to become vulnerable in the presence of her character's vulnerability.'
Sitting in her dressing room surrounded by four different bouquets, including roses from Sunset Boulevard 's Nicole Scherzinger, widely assumed to be her main competition at the Tonys on June 8, I ask McDonald: What is talent? Is it inspiration? Is it 10,000 hours of practice? Is it, as entrepreneurs like to say, just hard work? She pauses for a second, thinking. 'I think it's an open channel connection to the divine, whatever the divine means to you,' she says quietly, preserving her voice. 'Something coming through, that energy, that source, God, whatever you call it. It's an open channel connection to that. Just a turnpike, no roads in the way.'
Which is why this show has been marketed by only two words, telling you everything you need to know: 'Audra/Gypsy.' Musical theater's greatest performer taking on musical theater's greatest role.
McDonald has been singing and dancing onstage since she was 9. She was born in West Germany, where her father was serving in the military, but raised in Fresno, Calif., in the 1970s. Her father had been a high school band director before becoming associate superintendent of the Fresno school district, and her mother, an administrator at California State University, sang in the church choir. Her childhood home had both a piano and a jazz organ. 'Being musical and having musicality was just what everybody did in my family,' she says. McDonald didn't realize she was special until her father noticed that she sang louder than the other kids in the junior choir.
'One day after church, my mom and my dad had me matching pitches,' she recalls. 'They were whispering to each other. I remember thinking, What is this all about?' McDonald had been diagnosed as a hyperactive kid, she says, 'and they were looking for ways to channel my energy.' Her parents had just seen a show at the Fresno Dinner Theater, which had a junior company that performed before the main show.
Once she made the cut, she did Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, even Gypsy, playing one of the children in the little skit that opens the show (McDonald did not actually see the entire show when she was first in it as a child; the kids got to go home early). But when she was offered a role playing a servant girl, her parents forced her to decline.
At the time, she was devastated; looking back, however, she thinks their insistence was a gift. They worried that playing that part would have taught her, 'Well, I can only play servants and I can only play enslaved people.' Instead, refusing that role set her up for a lifetime of auditioning for interesting parts, 'even though I didn't necessarily look the way people think I should look.' If she wasn't cast, it wouldn't be because she didn't try out. 'That was instilled in me at a very early age, to not be the one to cut myself off from these roles.'
McDonald trained in classical music at Juilliard, which she recalls as an imperfect fit; in retrospect, she says, she should have studied drama. For a period after she graduated, McDonald struggled to get roles. She was told to make herself look as light as possible when she auditioned to play Julie in Show Boat, so 'I had all this white makeup on me, to try to lighten my face up.' She auditioned for the ensemble of Beauty and the Beast and didn't get the part.
Her first big role was Carrie in the 1994 revival of Carousel. She was 23. It was one of the first times that a Black actor was cast in a classic musical-theater role that had traditionally been seen as white. 'It was just this huge thing, just mind-blowing for a lot of people,' she says. 'Some people thought it was wrong and historically incorrect. And everybody's always going to have an opinion, especially when it's classics.' She won her first Tony for that role.
In the years since, colorblind casting has become far more normalized. 'Now I just don't think it's thought of as such a big deal,' she says. Even though this production of Gypsy stars not only a Black Mama Rose but also Black daughters—making this a show about a Black family seeking vaudeville fame in the 1930s—McDonald frequently points out that not a single line has been changed from the original show. Wolfe thinks that the 'boundary-breaking' nature of McDonald's performance is the least interesting thing about Gypsy. 'It shrinks the conversation,' he says. 'Because the wonder is the talent, the wonder is the gift, the wonder is how hard she works. To discuss her exclusively within a parameter of race, or how she's breaking through Broadway, that has more to say about Broadway than it has to say about Audra McDonald.'
But 30 years after Carousel, the conversation has not entirely moved on. 'A talent as rare as Audra McDonald shouldn't play a Black Rose. She should just play Rose,' wrote columnist John McWhorter in the New York Times, adding that a Black woman seeking Shirley Temple–style stardom for her Black daughters would be 'a delusion so quixotic that it would have to be the story's central tragedy.' After seeing her performance, McWhorter wrote a whole new piece: 'I've Changed My Mind. Audra McDonald Was Right.'
Let me tell you about the time I acted with Audra McDonald. Well, first let me clarify. I was a student intern on The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess in the summer of 2011, and McDonald was the star. One of the other actors twisted her ankle during blocking, so for a week of rehearsals, I stood onstage and did the injured cast member's physical movements while she sat in the wings, icing her ankle, saying her lines, and singing her songs. At one point, my character was supposed to give a drink of water to McDonald's Bess. We didn't have props yet, so I pretended to hand McDonald a glass the way a toddler might present an imaginary cup at a tea party. She took it, and drank. She drank the water as if it were a full gulp of cold water on a hot day, as if she could see the droplets spilling down the side of the non-glass that I sloppily handed her, the glass that she invented. Then she wiped her chin, where the imaginary water had spilled.
To show up and work like this every rehearsal, every performance, every day, McDonald has become an emotional athlete. 'She's a marathon runner.' says Baranski. 'She's a Navy SEAL.'
McDonald arrives at least three hours before every show. She gets into her wig and makeup, stretches, and does her vocal warm-ups. Then, a half hour before the show begins, she needs total quiet. She asks that nobody speak to her unless it's an emergency. 'It's almost like there's a bomb ... those things that implode before they explode? That's me,' she says. 'I'm clearing the way for me to go on her journey.' (In the middle of all this, she also has to rub a pepperoni stick all over her hands, which helps keep the little dog in check onstage.) Then, five minutes before curtain, 'I'm a little bit like a restless horse,' she says, banging on her knee in a galloping beat, like, 'Let's go.'
And indeed McDonald's career has been nonstop, if not always a straight line. Two years after Carousel she won another Tony, for her performance in Master Class. A few years later she won her third, for Ragtime. By that point, she was one of only a handful of actors in history to win three Tonys in five years; she was 27. Five years later, she won again, for A Raisin in the Sun, and earned an Emmy nomination for her role in the 2008 TV adaptation.
Still, she says, her onstage acclaim did not necessarily translate to roles beyond Broadway. 'People only see our successes,' she says. She was trying to break into television, but 'I was banging my head up against the wall.' There were 'years and years where I couldn't book a thing,' she says. 'I couldn't book a commercial.'
Finally, in 2007, as she was in the middle of a divorce from her first husband, she was cast as fertility specialist Naomi Bennett in Private Practice, Shonda Rhimes' spin-off of Grey's Anatomy. She commuted to L.A. for years, not wanting to uproot her young daughter Zoe from her home in New York. But eventually it became too much; she asked Rhimes to write her gracefully out of the show, so she could be back east for Zoe's teenage years.
It was soon after McDonald returned from L.A. that she took on the part of Bess. That role demonstrated the lengths she would go to to bring a character to life. She would repeatedly go back to the original texts, insisting her character have a scar on her face because that's how she was described in the novel that inspired the play that inspired the opera. She interviewed sex workers and drug addicts in order to inform her emotional understanding of the role. Even months after the critics had come and gone, she was still doing more research to deepen her connection to Bess. One day, well after the show had opened, Paulus visited her backstage. 'She was like, 'I just watched this documentary,'' Paulus recalls. 'We'd done a run at American Repertory Theater, we'd done a run on Broadway, and she's still searching, she's still learning.'
Two years later, she played Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill (Tony No. 6) and was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in the TV broadcast. (She has one Emmy for hosting a PBS special as well as two Grammys, so she needs only an Oscar to complete her EGOT.)
When she took a role in Shuffle Along in 2016, however, McDonald's physically taxing career crashed against her family life. By then McDonald was married again, to Broadway actor Will Swenson, but she was surprised to learn during rehearsals that she was pregnant again at 45. It was a complicated pregnancy, full of swelling and water in the knees at a moment when she had to do a lot of high-energy dancing. One night, while she was singing her big number, she started to hemorrhage onstage. 'I felt it happen. I felt that gush,' she told me when I interviewed her in 2023. 'And I thought, 'I just lost my baby, and I'm still singing.''
It turned out McDonald did not lose her pregnancy that night; her younger daughter Sally is now 8. But after experiencing a second medical event onstage and leaving mid-performance to go to the hospital, she did have to back out of Shuffle Along. When the show closed shortly afterward, her pregnancy was blamed. That experience, she says, taught her about the pressures women face while trying to balance motherhood with a career in the theater. 'It was very interesting to have people in the business come up to me afterwards and say things like, 'Oh, wow, your baby literally stopped that show,'' she recalls. 'That was really difficult and unnecessary.'
'It's so hard to have the kind of career Audra had and to have a marriage and a family,' says Baranski. 'She's the total human being and the total performer. Often one thing suffers because of the other, but she brings it all together.'
In many ways, McDonald has lived Mama Rose's dream. Rose is a woman who swallowed her own aspirations and put them into her girls, trying to save her daughters from a life where they 'cook and clean and sit and die,' as Rose puts it. 'People were always referring to Rose as some monster,' McDonald says. 'I think she's not a monster.'
McDonald doesn't need her audiences to like Rose, but she needs them to understand her. 'I think she's a woman with very few options, big ambitions, big dreams, big trauma that she's trying to run from,' she says. 'She is trying, and she's not succeeding.'
I ask McDonald if the show had made her think differently about her own girls. 'So interesting having one that's 8 and one that's 24,' she says. 'And when I started this show, it was before the election, and where are we now?' She does what can only be described as a full-body shudder. Sally wants to be a veterinarian or an astronaut or a tennis star, depending on the day. Zoe works at a theater and is playing bass for a new musical. 'I want happiness and fulfillment and health for them. I want them to be able to be free, to be who they are, to express that without fear of persecution,' she says. 'Then the other dream is to recognize and respect all people and all different cultures and ways of being and ways of expressing and ways of living and ways of existing, and they do.' Then she exhales a long breath. 'It's a weird time.'
Performances of Gypsy began less than three weeks after the 2024 election, which not only dashed the dreams of those who hoped to elect the first Black woman President but also marked a culmination of a cultural backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Since then, President Trump has taken over as chair of the Kennedy Center, where McDonald has performed on multiple occasions, and his Administration has slashed millions of dollars of arts funding, with National Endowment for the Arts grants being summarily canceled.
I ask McDonald how she's staying sane through all of this. 'I don't know that I am,' she says. She flexes her fingers as if she's making and unmaking a fist. It's clear she has thoughts—a lot of them—but she's weighing what to share. After a long silence, she says there's only one way through the madness: 'Let art bring people back to their humanity.'
McDonald has been deliberate about using her stature to create more opportunities for other Black performers; she co-founded Black Theatre United after George Floyd's murder to combat systemic racism in commercial theater. But now, she's using her politics to fuel her performance. 'Night after night, the show has to feel fresh. So sometimes you have to find new veins to open,' she says. 'Post-election, I didn't have to search as hard for the veins. They were raw and coming right up.'
There's a moment at the end of the show when Rose, rejected by her children, finally comes to terms with her thwarted ambitions for herself. She is the stage mother, and not the star, because she 'was born too soon and started too late.' She sings in a frenzy, her face streaked with tears, as her lips quiver and her hands reach up spread-fingered toward a future she never got a chance to grasp: 'When is it my turn?' And you can see it, in this sweating, crying, grasping moment: the clear turnpike, the open channel to the divine.
Normally, McDonald doesn't like to know who is in the audience. But on the night former Vice President Kamala Harris came to see the show in February, somebody let it slip. That night, when she sang those words—'When is it my turn?'—it was about so much more than one stage mother's vaudeville ambitions.
McDonald has based her Rose on her aunts, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and whenever she sings this final song, 'I always feel them coming up.' But the night Harris was in the audience was different. 'I felt like I had roots shooting all the way down to the center of the earth, and then just shooting all the way up through my head,' as if she were channeling 'every Black woman that's ever lived,' she says. 'That's what it felt like to me that night that she was there.'
Given all of her accomplishments, it's reasonable to wonder where she goes from here. How does one push past the pinnacle? For McDonald, though, it's hard to look beyond Gypsy. She will return on the third season of The Gilded Age in late June, and is thinking of starting a concert tour soon, but the Broadway run was recently extended through October, and she has no plans to leave.
And if she breaks her own record at the Tonys? McDonald would be honored, she says, but the awards are not the point. 'They don't change your life per se,' she says. 'They change people's perception of you, people's expectations of you.' When I ask her what she means, her face starts to transform into a Greek chorus of envy and concern. ''Well, you've got a Tony, you must be something!' Or: 'You've got a Tony, and you didn't get nominated this time, so now you're a loser!' Or: 'Are you OK? Oh, God, you didn't win, oh God!''
Her face returns to normal. 'That's all being thrown on you: it's perception and expectation,' she says. 'It's an incredible honor, but it's almost like you have nothing to do with you actually winning a Tony. You can do your work, and that's it. All I can do is do my work.'