Review: Audra McDonald in Concert with The National Symphony Orchestra at Kennedy Center Concert Hall

Audra McDonald has (at least) four voices--Broadway, jazz, opera, blues--not to mention six Tonys. She brought them all (the voices, not the awards) to her two hour concert with the National Symphony Pops which repeats Wednesday evening, January 31. The lady can sing anything, but she chooses so very well: Lerner and Loewe, Kander and Ebb, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Jerry Herman, Duke Ellington, Jule Styne, Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim. These are a few of her favorite things.

In between numbers, she chats with the audience as if the Kennedy Center Concert Hall were an intimate club. (Is that why the room suddenly has grey curtains all over the walls? Bodes ill for acoustics.) One great story tells of her evolving as a teen in Show Choir in her Fresno high school before, well, Juilliard. And Tuesday night some of the stories were about Miss Chita because a star is gone. You're broken-hearted, but you go on.

McDonald's rendition of "Soon as I Get Home," Dorothy's song from Charlie Smalls' The Wiz, turns a good song into a show-stopper. She steps away from the microphone for "Summertime," reminding us all that sounds and voices are three-dimensional and not flat and loud. Musical theatre existed for centuries before the invention of artificial amplification; a microphone is a sometime thing.

Another highlight connects Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You've Got to be Taught" with Sondheim's "Children Will Listen," from South Pacific and Into the Woods, respectively. The words "careful" and "carefully" connect the numbers. And fine actress that she is, McDonald carefully observes Hammerstein's lesson to Sondheim that a song in a musical must be a kind of one-act play. The National Symphony, guest conducted by Andy Einhorn, played (no disrespect) most excellent second fiddle to McDonald's portfolio. The orchestra outdid itself after intermission accompanying McDonald on "Before the Parade Passes By." (Hey, Mr. Producer: we're ready for Audra McDonald's Dolly.) Their too-precise and not schmaltzy enough reading of The Carousel Waltz at the top of the evening undermined that magnificent piece, itself conceived with oomph similar to the aforementioned parade and as Viennese as it is American. But, as Barbara Cook once pointed out, it's better with a band. So NSO Pops + Audra McDonald = one singular sensation.

(photo by Autumn de Wilde)

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