“I’m trying to get to the truth of why I’m singing this song,” says Audra McDonald, the stage and television star who has won more Tony awards than any other performer. Speaking on a video call from her home near New York City, McDonald is dressed down – with horn-rimmed glasses and a polka-dot head scarf – but later this month she will dress up to front a 40-person orchestra at the London Palladium, singing selections from “the American songbook”.
What that constitutes can be a vexed question. (Answers usually involve white men, Duke Ellington excepted.) What it means to be American and to represent American culture, these are tough ones, too. But McDonald, 52, has enlarged the notion of what that songbook can sound like, what American excellence can look like. As a Black woman commanding stages that have not always welcomed Black women, she delivers these songs with an open heart and expansive soprano, transmuting midcentury classics into something fresh. “A specific song changes through my vessel,” she says.
