I’m not at all sure when Kathy and I first fell in love with Audra McDonald, but we fell hard – and when we saw her perform at the Ravinia Festival, it only deepened our devotion to this utterly unique artist with the glorious voice and extraordinary expressivity. . . and it also helped the two of us realize that there is something especially fun about loving someone together. I mean, Kathy tries really hard to be excited for me when I tell her that Christine Goerke is singing Elektra at the Lyric next year – and I really do try to hide my dismay and feign enthusiasm for “Dancing with the Stars” – but the truth is that our musical tastes are rather distinct from each other. And that’s great- I would hate for us to get into arguments over who gets to bring the “Kristen Flagstad Sings Wagner” CD with them to work that day. But when it comes to Audra McDonald, neither of us is faking or feigning anything. We both adore this woman and everything she does.
We saw her years ago in the Martin Theater at Ravinia and fell head over heels all over again- crying buckets as she sang “I Won’t Mind”- and if anything loved her even more year or two later when we saw her in Ravinia’s main pavilion – especially at the end when she sang an extraordinary performance of “My Man’s Gone Now” from Porgy and Bess as an encore. She introduced it by saying that her doctor preferred her not to sing any such taxing encores, due to the fact that she was pregnant . . . . (wild applause broke out at that announcement) . . . . and then proceeded to blow the roof off of the place. We were there with our friends Randy and Beth Bush (fine musicians both) and I think the four of us stumbled out of there rather shellshocked at what we had just experienced – and feeling incredibly grateful to have been there.
So we owned every one of her recordings as well as a neat concert video – and made a point of watching every one of her television appearances. But we had yet to see her onstage in a full role… which is where she is truly peerless. But with her assumption of a major role on the hit TV series “Private Practice” we had reason to wonder if her newfound stardom would end up diverting her away from the Broadway stage for good. But it turns out that a creature of the stage like Audra McDonald couldn’t stay away from the stage for long- and we were thrilled when we learned that she would be back on Broadway in a revival of Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess. We had gotten a good idea of what she could do with the role of Bess after seeing her, Brian Stokes Mitchell and the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas in a PBS telecast celebrating Gershwin’s 100th birthday with, among other things, extensive excerpts from Porgy & Bess. Audra actually sang songs for Bess, Serena and Clara and made them all her own. It was an astounding dramatic tour de force, even in the confines of a concert performance. The thought of seeing her someday in a full-fledged staging of the opera was almost too much to wish for.
This particular revival of Porgy & Bess had attracted some unexpected attention when Stephen Sondheim himself penned an extremely critical letter that was published for all the world to read. In it, he took the producers to task for daring to mess with a masterwork – shuffling the plot, jazzing up the score, adding dialogue and even scenes, and in general shifting the work from its operatic origins to something that felt much more like a Broadway musical – all with the intention of bringing the characters much more fully to life. Sondheim tore into them in a letter that accused director Diane Paulus – and even Audra McDonald herself – of willful arrogance and ignorance. To be clear, Sondheim sounded off before the show had even opened; he was just responding to what was said in a New York Times article. Still, to hear such thundering criticism from this Broadway legend was disconcerting- – – and then when I watched Norm Lewis sing “I Got Plenty of Nuttin’ “ on television, I found myself even more worried that this an opera which I like a lot would be all but unrecognizable. And as much as that prospect worried me, I was even more worried that Kathy would love it and I would hate it; it would be “Dancing with the stars” all over again, except that instead of disagreeing over a free TV show, we would be disagreeing over a show we shelled out a lot of money to see.
Well, I’m not sure I would want to take on Mr. Sondheim in a debate over whether or not this revival was well-conceived or not – appropriate or not – effective or not. I’m not sure I would know how to rebut any of his thundering criticisms. All I can say is . . . I loved it as much as anything I have ever seen in a theater. And Audra McDonald’s performance as Bess is perhaps the greatest single performance I have ever seen on any stage, rivaled only by the incomparable Cherry Jones in Doubt. But for as challenging as that role was, Cherry Jones didn’t have to sing. She didn’t have to dance. She didn’t have to travel the arc from sultry drug user to a woman desperately trying to right her own course before slipping down into the abyss again. And she didn’t have to make us believe that she was being brutalized and assaulted right before our eyes. Audra did all that. She made Bess a living, breathing figure in a way that I have not ever experienced before in the full opera- where the story plays out in slightly more stilted, overblown fashion. What we saw the other night on Broadway was incredibly, viscerally, heartrendingly REAL. And with all due respect to Mr. Sondheim, that never would have been possible without the daring innovations of this production. And the proof of that was partly in the deafening ovation at the end of the night- but I think it was even more firmly demonstrated in the moments during the performance when everything onstage came to a full stop, and the absolute silence in the theater was like nothing I have ever heard. We all were that transfixed.
By the way, this was not just the Audra McDonald Show. Norm Lewis was a very fine Porgy, if not quite the richly- voiced opera singer I would have preferred in the role. And I never did figure out how he managed to portray Porgy’s crippled state so convincingly. The way his one leg dragged uselessly behind him, grotesquely twisted to the one side, made it look for all the world like he had survived some horrific accident or was living with some terrible birth defect. And Porgy’s physical brokenness made his sunny optimism all the more moving and endearing. And around the two of them was gathered a superlative cast, including a mountainous actor who made the character of Crown (the brutal former boyfriend of Bess) truly terrifying and another who made drug dealer Sportin‘ Life both despicable and irresistible. How scary a combination is that?
It was a wondrous night- with two unexpected codas. The first came right after the curtain calls, when Audra McDonald addressed the audience and asked us to make donations to the charitable cause Broadway Cares, and then invited someone to the stage who had made an extraordinarily generous donation to the cause. That guy took the stage with his partner (also a guy) and then in front of both the cast and audience, asked for his hand in marriage. Wow.
Coda #2 came afterwards, as we gathered by the stage door in hopes of at least catching a glimpse of the night’s Porgy and Bess. One of the truly priceless aspects of attending Broadway shows, for performers and audience members alike, is that there are these moments where one can express and receive gratitude and praise for the performance just given. If you’re fortunate enough to be towards the front of the gathered throng, you might manage to get an autograph- and as we discovered, it really helps if you’ve purchased one of the fancy $20 programs. (Funny how the cast members spot those very easily even in a huge throng and pluck them to sign ahead of the dozens of small free programs fluttering around them.) And then, my wife, in one of the greatest mountaintop thrills of her whole life, got to have her photo taken both with Mr. Lewis and with Ms. McDonald- and in both cases, it was because Kathy kindly agreed to take someone else’s picture with them but did so with a sweet “if I get one, too.” (Ever hear of an eye for an eye?) Those two photos hang proudly on my Facebook wall (and Kathy’s too, of course) . . . and years from now, when we’re old and crotchety (we really aren’t yet) we’ll be able to look at those photos and remember that memorable night we spent with the brave, determined folk of Catfish Row. . . the night we watched Audra McDonald become Bess right before our eyes.
photo above: The cast acknowledges the orchestra. You can probably spot pretty easily the guy who portrayed the menacing Crown – or was it the Incredible Hulk?