Audra McDonald

About Audra McDonald

She may be a Juilliard-trained four-time Tony Award–winning singer and actress who has released three solo albums and performed with every major orchestra in the US, but Audra McDonald is not one to rest on her laurels. “I guess I’m one of those people who jumps in and then thinks about it,” she says about changing things up a bit for her fourth solo album for Nonesuch Records, Build a Bridge, on which she performs works by contemporary singer/songwriters. “I don’t worry about what other people will think. I just choose material that moves me. My hope with this album is that people who are familiar with the artists will enjoy a different take on them, that’s all.”

The vivacious McDonald is a restlessly creative spirit who is reluctant to be typecast as strictly a musical theater artist, despite her enormous success in that area. So when it came time to record Build a Bridge, McDonald was looking for a new challenge. “I wanted to do something that explored areas other than musical theater,” she says. “Basically I was looking outside the box.”

The result is a stunning 13-song collection of songs written by artists from the pop world, including Elvis Costello, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, and Neil Young; younger songwriters John Mayer, Rufus Wainwright, and Nellie McKay; and two compositions by her longtime friend and collaborator, musical theater writer Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza).

When McDonald performed several songs that appear on Build a Bridge at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series in January 2005, the New York Times called her a “one-woman crossroads of vocal genres whose conceptual flair and vocal flexibility upend conventional wisdom about the boundaries between classical and popular song.” Indeed, McDonald brings new dimensions and fresh insight to the work of these songwriters by using her dramatic instincts to heighten the narrative and emotional arc of each song.

For McDonald’s longtime fans, the album will allow them to experience a different side of this lustrously voiced, intensely committed singer as she explores different territory. “It’s still me,” she says. “I’m not singing these songs with a different voice or style. As always, I chose songs that I enjoy mining for their emotional gold.”

To help her find her way, McDonald turned to her longtime musical director Ted Sperling, who recommended she bring in Doug Petty, a producer and keyboardist who worked with Shawn Colvin and Roseanne Cash, among others, to handle production duties. “We needed someone who could give the songs great arrangements that were somewhere between pop and musical theater,” McDonald says. “Doug grew up in New York around musical theater, but does much of his work in the pop world. So he brought a pop language, but with an understanding of where I was coming from. He was brilliant at marrying the two worlds in a way that felt very organic and genuine.”

As for song selection, McDonald says her criteria were songs that sounded like they could have been in a musical, in terms of strong story telling, but that were not musical theater songs. To that end, she and Sperling dug deep into the catalogs of various artists and unearthed the Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello collaboration “God Give Me Strength” from the 1996 movie Grace of my Heart, which Costello’s wife, Diana Krall had once suggested McDonald sing, and Neil Young’s lovely folk ballad “My Heart” from his 1994 album Sleeps With Angels, which is about following your dreams even if they lead to death. “I just thought, God, what a strange, sad, simple little song. And being the drama queen that I am, I wanted to do it,” she says with a laugh.

The most familiar choice on the album is Joseph Raposo’s “Bein’ Green,” which may have been popularized by one Kermit the Frog, but was also covered by Shirley Horn on her 1993 Ray Charles tribute album Light Out of Darkness.“Her version is one of the most beautifully acted pieces ever and it inspired me to sing it,” McDonald says. “It’s this deep children’s song about learning to love oneself—and there’s something about that, even as an adult, that still speaks to me.”

Also included on Build a Bridge are two songs by innovative pop-jazz singer Laura Nyro: “Tom Cat Goodbye,” about a woman who kills her cheating lover—which McDonald describes as a “wild, three-act opera where you hit every emotion possible within the span of a three-and-a-half-minute-pop song”—from Nyro’s 1969 album New York Tendaberry and the gospel-influenced ballad “To a Child” from 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual, which resonated with McDonald who has a young daughter, Zoe, with her husband, bass player Pete Donovan. “Only someone who is a parent would describe a child as ‘an elf on speed,’” she says. “It just spoke to me as a mom."

McDonald and Sperling also selected material from several younger artists, including the tartly ironic “I Wanna Get Married” from witty singer-songwriter Nellie McKay and the Spanish-influenced mood piece “Damned Ladies” by Rufus Wainwright. Then there’s the acoustic guitar-driven “My Stupid Mouth,” written by singer-songwriter John Mayer, which is given new life here. “I’m such a geek, I wasn’t very familiar with John’s music. Ted played me that song and I was like, ‘That’s great, what show is it from?” she says, laughing. “I love the story he tells, about a guy who talks too much on a date. That was certainly my life before I met my husband!”

McDonald also includes several songs by composers best known for their work in the theater, including Jessica Molaskey and Ricky Ian Gordon (“Cradle and All”), Jane Kelly Williams (“Wonderful You”), and Adam Guettel (“Build a Bridge,” “Dividing Day”). On “Dividing Day,” which is from the Tony Award–winning musical Light in the Piazza, McDonald is accompanied by noted jazz pianist Fred Hersch. “That’s kind of the cheat—the one song that’s from a musical,” McDonald says. “But we tried to separate it from the show as much as we could while remaining true to the original intent of the piece.”

Build a Bridge was recorded between November 2005 and March 2006 in New York and Los Angeles as McDonald prepared to make her operatic debut with the Houston Grand Opera. “I was feeling very schizophrenic at the time, singing opera one day and Elvis Costello the next,” she says. But it’s all in a day’s work for this Fresno, CA, native who has been working pretty much non-stop since making her Broadway debut in The Secret Garden shortly after graduating from Juilliard in 1993. From there, her career picked up apace when she earned Tony awards in 1994, 1996, and 1998 for Carousel, Master Class, and Ragtime, and again in 2004 for the revival of A Raisin in the Sun.

In addition, McDonald has recorded three previous solo albums for Nonesuch—Way Back to Paradise (1998), How Glory Goes (2000), and Happy Songs (2002)—toured the US giving solo performances with her ensemble, and appeared regularly on many of the great stages of the world including in London, Paris, and Berlin. On television, McDonald has performed in numerous PBS specials and starred in Mister Sterling on NBC and Private Practice on ABC. In 2001, she was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in Wit—the HBO film of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson. Born into a musical family, McDonald has been profiled by 60 Minutes and The Today Show.