The New Yorker Radio Hour - Audra McDonald on Stephen Sondheim, “Gypsy,” and Being Black on Broadway

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

“Gypsy,” a work by Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and Arthur Laurents, is often called the greatest of American musicals; a new production on Broadway is a noteworthy event, especially when a star like Audra McDonald is cast in the lead role of Rose. McDonald has won six Tonys for her acting, in both plays and musicals. In the repertoire of musicals, race in casting is still very much an issue, and one columnist criticized her portrayal of Rose because of her race. “I have dealt with this my entire career,” McDonald tells Michael Schulman, recalling that in her breakout performance, in “Carousel,” some audiences “were upset with me that I was playing Carrie, saying, ‘She wouldn’t have been Black.’ There’s a man who comes down from heaven with a star in his hand!” In a wide-ranging interview onstage at The New Yorker Festival, McDonald discusses how when she was a child theatre was initially intended to be a type of therapy for her, and the roles her parents wouldn’t let her take. “Gypsy” is currently in previews on Broadway.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. 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. All the more so when a star like Audre MacDonald 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. Roger 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 Shorten. Audra, thanks so much for being here. I know you're deep in rehearsal. Yeah, we're in week four of rehearsals right now. How's it going? What did you guys do, like, today?

We started the day working on everything's coming up roses And then after lunch we did roses turn So that's how my day's gone today That's intense It's very intense, very intense, yeah Wow Has this been a long dream of yours, goal of yours to play Rose Or was it something that came up more recently?

Like how did this start for you? I mean, was it a long time dream of mine? No, no. It's a show that I obviously grew up knowing and loving, and I was in it in my dinner theater in Fresno, California. I played one of Uncle Jocko's kiddies. And, you know, I've seen, you know, the few iterations that I've been able to see, you know, obviously in the movie, the TV movie.

And 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 close to him. And we usually spent thanksgivings together. And he was there. And he said, I want to talk to you about something. I want to talk to you about something. And 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've 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. like, what, you're crazy? He's like, you know, you have to do this. You have to do this. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. Yeah, I, you know, I could see how maybe, it could be played

by a black woman. And yeah, that'd be a real challenge. And then just conversations kind of started. And Stephen Sondheim was obviously still alive at the time. And he was very supportive of the idea and said, yes. And then we started down that long road. And it just took a long time for it all to come together, timing and whatnot. So then once you, you know, talk to Steven Sondheim about it, what was that conversation like? Was it like you needed his blessing? How does that work? Sondheim, another one that I miss terribly, he's always been an incredible teacher and supporter. Very supportive. My career has always sort of like offered suggestions and ideas and 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. And I just felt very supported by him. And so when it was brought up to him, he thought it was a great idea. And he said, I think that's terrific. And actually, there was another show of his, too, that, you know, he kind of wanted me to be a part of as well. And 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. What's the other one?

I get a little night music, maybe some day or that. We'll be there. Let me get this one out of the way. You know, 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. Like, she mentions that she's been married three times. Obviously, she has two kids. And presumably she had some kind of like dreams that were thwarted because she's, ranting and raving about them at the end, but like, do you, as part of this process, create a backstory for her? Is that important to you? Or is it just like, you know, curtain up and she's a moving train?

Oh, no, no, no. You have to, you know, I mean, the great thing about Gypsy is, is while it's based on, you know, 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 and so the way that they were able to legally get beyond that was to call this a musical fable and so it's suggested by you know her history so obviously I start with that as source material you know you that's you have to and then I sort of build in okay she can still be from Seattle of course there were black people in Seattle then you know. 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 kind of make believe

that there were black people performing in vaudeville at this time. We have to kind of 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. But I will say we're not changing a single solitaire.

line in the show. Not a single solitary one. There's no need. And some of them actually hit in a different way. Really? When you think about some of the lines coming out of a black woman,

they hit in a different way in 2024. When this show was announced earlier in the summer, there was this John McWhorter op-ed in the New York Times that, first of all, I can't think of another example of like a New York Times column sort of taking issue with a Broadway production, like months before it's gone into rehearsal. But it was about this question of sort of rethinking Rose as a black character.

He wrote, Rose isn't just being played by a black actress. He'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 of 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, kind of like speculating about what it might be like. If you want to rebut this column, you are welcome to, but I'm sort of curious about what conversations have been sparked with George, with the people putting on the show about, like, how do you sort of square sort of things that don't historically maybe line up in a literal way? It's a musical fable. 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? Look, I mean, I have dealt with this my entire career. You know, people upset with me for, you know, that I was playing Carrie in, in, in, Carousel saying, well, she wouldn't have been black and da-da-da-da. There's a man who comes down from heaven with a star in his hand. 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, they can do that too. But that's what we're doing. We're telling this story. Amen. Well, you know, 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? I was 23. And it was right out of Juilliard.

It was like a year or so. Yeah. It was such a rapid rise. You went at a Tony Ward, very young. Had you been auditioning and stuff before then, waiting tables? What was like the moment before that like? Yeah. 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 nine. And 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. It was probably what I should have done, but I just thought, well, I have a strong voice, so I'll do that. And so what I underestimated was how much I would be shoved in the classical direction vocally. And I wasn't really given the opportunity to take acting lessons, to take movement or, you know, diction like all the other acting students that Juilliard were doing. You know, people like, actually, I was in school with Viola Davis. She was there at the same time as well and 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. and I left Juilliard for a little while because I just couldn't handle it anymore.

And 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 and then I came back and did the last two months of Secret Garden on Broadway and finished school at the same time. And then from that I went back out on the road and I got an agent and my agent said, we've got this audition for you for Carousel. Roger McDonald's singing a bit from Carousel, and she's talking with the New Yorker's Michael Schulman.

We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Recently at the New Yorker Festival, the celebrated actress and singer Audra McDonald talk with our staff writer, Michael Schulman. We'll return to that conversation.

Now, here's 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 ways. But, like, when you were a kid in Fresno doing, like, you know, theater, like how much of a roadmap did you have for yourself about being a Broadway leading lady? I wasn't even thinking leading lady. I was, you know, a little black girl from Fresno, nine years old, in this dinner theater. got to be Uncle Jocco's kitty.

I was, you know, a kid in the ensemble of Hello Dolly. I, you know, I ended up, they cast me when I was 16 to play Ava Perron and Evita at the local dinner theater, which was a big scandal because they double cast the role, and the other woman was a 23 or 24-year-old white woman. And so this is Fresno, land of like... Devin Nunes, yeah, right? So, yeah, so people would call the box off and say, office and say, is the black or the white, one on tonight. I'm not even kidding. But, you know, 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, you know? And, you know, Gypsy is among many other things, a show about motherhood about being a parent. I'm curious about how your parents kind of guided your early interest in acting in theater? It was guided primarily as a means of sort of like to be therapy for me because I was a hyperactive child who was having a lot of problems in school, not socializing well, considered very overdramatic. and and, but not functioning well, you know,

and they were told, let's try riddalen. This was 1976, 77, let's try riddalen. And my parents thought, no, we don't want to, we don't, I don't, I'm not judging anybody who does do it. And my parents weren't either. They just said, we don't think that's right for our girl. But they knew that I like to. sing and 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. And I believe there was a role that they actually told you not to take when you were little. Yeah. So 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. And they were doing the Miracle World. and I auditioned and got cast as like sort of 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, and I guess I just went and auditioned without, you know, telling my parents, whatever.

And when I got cast, they said, you will absolutely not be playing that role. Absolutely not. And I was upset, and they said, you'll understand when you're older, but we don't want you doing that. And so they put their foot down. And I understand it. I understand why they did that. You know, they were, you know, my parents were educators.

My dad was, ended up being associate superintendent of schools in Fresno, California before he retired. And my mom worked at California State University for years. And, like, I remember trying to watch little rascals. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, you're not watching that. You know, they, you know, pride in who I was and pride in being a black person and not demeaning myself in a in a society that you know sought to demean and separate and other black people um something they they were very very adamant about making sure that I had pride in myself in that way and so no I remember trying to thinking about trying to audition for showboat as

well and they were like you ain't doing that you knew it and not that I mean again wonderful musical, but my parents are like, there's other, you don't need to do that. There's a Sonheim song that you've kind of claimed over the years, uh, the glamorous life from alma night music. 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 whither on. And it's not even the glamorous life that's in the show.

It's like the secret one that was in the movie that no one ever talks about. Right. Elizabeth Taylor. And it's, you know, kind of the inverse of gypsy. It's, you know, not a stage mother driving her children. Yeah. In show business, it's a child whose mother is a great star. Yeah.

And she kind of sings about how she was just, you know, her mother's off living the glamorous life. But you can tell, even though she doesn't realize that she's, you know, longing for her mom. Yeah. Yeah. Why did that song become your go-to song for so many things? I think a couple reasons,

but the main one is because I am a mother of two girls. I also have two step-sons. And I am that mom that is sometimes off, not necessarily leading what I call the glamorous life.

My life gets glamorous when I get to be home with my family. You know, 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. So I sing that song as therapy for my fears, I guess. I'm sure it's also a way of sort of projecting to them. Like, I see you. I understand what this might be like. to have, you know, not just a performing mom, but like, you know, it's a theater household.

It's a theater household. It's a theater household. It's a theater household. Yes, and I have to say my youngest one is most, you know, because our other kids are a product of, my husband is an actor, Will Swenson, and, you know, our kids from our other marriage is a product of one performer and then someone who's not a performer, but our little one, poor thing. that's just a child of performers DNA coming in on both sides and 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 and we were getting ready to start rehearsals and he went up to Sally and he's like you know I'm going to be working with your mom in Gypsy and he said is anything what do you want to you want to tell me and she said well First of all, she's got a lot of vibrato. Roger 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 Yorkers Michael Shulman. What do you live 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. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick.

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