Audra McDonald is thrilled with the luxe, vinyl release of Gypsy Starring Audra McDonald (2024 Broadway Cast Recording): “The presentation is gorgeous. It’s good old-fashioned vinyl, the old days of big booklets, glossy pictures and all the lyrics.” That being said, there’s no way she’ll listen to it for at least 10 years. “No, no, no,” she tells Billboard. “I’m too close to it right now. I don’t have the same experience of it anyone else would, so I wouldn’t enjoy listening to it.”
Mama Rose needn’t take offense – the six-time Tony winner has the same decade-or-more aversion to all the cast recordings she’s made over the course of her groundbreaking career. But for those who do drop the needle (or hit play) on this latest imagining of the Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents musical, they’ll find more than just new recordings of old standbys. The pained nuance that McDonald brought to George C. Wolfe’s 2024 production of Gypsy radiates throughout this radio play-style album. It’s not simply that her soprano sounds magnificent on standards such as “Some People” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (though it does), but that she brings a tortured, empathetic humanity to a piece that’s frequently been called the Mt. Everest of musical theater.
When McDonald reaches the peak of “Rose’s Turn,” her typically flawless, operatic voice begins to choke and sputter; in those moments, the listener is as much of a witness to the showbiz matriarch’s “full-on emotional breakdown” as the theatergoer was during her Tony-nominated run.
“The sessions were great. Easy? No,” McDonald says, adding that she was “grateful” for director Wolfe’s presence and feedback in the studio. “It was a joyous experience, but it was hard. How ‘bout all those contradictions,” she laughs.
“Stepping into such an iconic, classic role [means] that everybody is an expert on how the role is to be played,” she muses of a complex character who is selfless yet selfish, driven and delusional in equal measure. “Everybody is an expert, so you’re going to fail in somebody’s world. Honestly, I would say the only people who can truly call themselves well-versed in the role are the people who have played it. Until you’ve stepped into that role, you don’t know. You just don’t,” she chuckles. “For people to say, ‘She shouldn’t say it like this because this is what’s going on,’ I think that’s all hogwash. Only the people who have played this role can comment on it with the true knowledge of it.”
True to that spirit, McDonald demurs when I ask if she has any advice to offer Nichelle Lewis, who is currently playing Sarah — the role that gave McDonald her third Tony for best featured actress in a musical — in a new Broadway production of Ragtime.
“I hear she’s killing it, I can’t wait to see it,” she says, pausing. “The only advice I have is to leave the character at the theater and not take it home – it’s such a heavy, painful, traumatic role. Leave it there. It’s okay to let it go and not bring it home and not stay in the world of Sarah when you’re away from the theater. Let her encompass you in the theater, but it’s a long time to be in that much pain.”
At this point in her career, McDonald has learned how to keep emotionally heavy roles out of her home–although she does admit to accidentally slipping into Mama Rose while doing a Gilded Age TV shoot amidst Gypsy’s run: “I said my first line and had to stop and say, ‘Oh, we need to do that again. I sound too much like Mama Rose, the attack and the energy.’”
Theater critics and online pundits notwithstanding, McDonald does seem pleased by the feedback she received from one person about her portrayal. “My older daughter is 24 and saw the show a few times. She was very loving and very complimentary of the work. She said it made her appreciate that (Rose) is not the kind of mother I am — which is absolutely what you want to hear. But she said she was able to see the love this woman has for these girls.”
McDonald’s other daughter was less enraptured—at least, at first. “My eight-year-old saw the show on opening night and was asleep by ‘Rose’s Turn,’” she says wryly. “But from time to time, I can hear her singing, ‘This time for me, for me’ in her room.”
