“My voice isn’t an instrument I can just hang up on a hook.” — Audra McDonald

For Audra McDonald’s birthday

My good friend Ted and I were once talking about Audra McDonald and her performance of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” in the live televised version of The Sound of Music, and what a powerhouse it was. You can see Carrie Underwood, receiving the power of McDonald at close range, and you can see Underwood almost shattered by what was going on, what was coming at her. It’s hard to look at anyone other than Audra, but I was deeply touched by Underwood. She is barely holding on. Even with McDonald’s performance, it is Underwood’s reaction – as a fellow performer – which is the true tribute. Unfortunately, I can’t find the live version on Youtube, so McDonald performing it at the Kennedy Center will have to do. I honestly thought I never needed to hear that song ever again. Or, hell, even once. I’m not a fan. But McDonald revitalizes it singlehandedly.

Audra McDonald’s voice is one of the great instruments of our time.

But we must not forget her acting and how her acting elevates her voice into a truly transcendent space, similar to what Judy Garland could do, what all the great singers can do. In that regard: I want to talk about McDonald’s live performance of “Maybe This Time.” I consider it to be a high watermark of live performance.

Sometimes it’s helpful to compare/contrast, although some seem to dislike it, assuming you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Believe me. I am not. Kristen Chenoweth has a phenomenal instrument, and she also can act. However: when Chenoweth sang “Maybe This Time” on Glee, she – in my opinion – dodged the entire point of the song. It’s a deep song: you MUST deal with the lyrics, you must FEEL those lyrics, otherwise … who cares.

I really dislike her version of it because she does not want to deal with the emotions of the song. In my opinion, she can’t relate to the self-loathing (“Everybody loves a winner, so nobody loved me”). Chenoweth is invested in herself as a “winner.” Which, of course, is great, good for her. But as an actor you can’t care about that if the moment calls for something else. “Maybe This Time” is brutal, and trying to weasel out of the song’s implications is a fake. “Maybe This Time” is not a song of plucky triumph, but that’s the way Chenoweth plays it, down to the last show-off note. Natasha Richardson didn’t have a phenomenal voice, but her performance of the song when I saw her on Broadway, was so painful it was a harrowing experience sitting through it. I’m not exaggerating: I could barely stand to be sitting there watching. I wrote about it here, when Richardson died. Liza Minnelli’s version was different from all of these (I go into the differences in the Natasha Richardson piece). Minnelli played as hard as she could Sally’s delusional state, her self-willed belief in her own amazing-ness, and it’s insanely disturbing and thrilling. The song can take different interpretations, but you can’t DODGE anything while singing it: you have to FACE it.

Back to McDonald: watch the clip above. She FACES it.

Watch how she lets the song build, and not just the song itself, but the song’s story, and the emotions the song unleashes. The song is working ON her. As the song climbs the scales, she is not in the driver’s seat, the song pulls her up and up and up. (And of course, it’s not that simple: she IS in the driver’s seat. This is her brilliance as an actress and a performer. She is controlled enough with her instrument that she can craft it, and she does it in a way where it doesn’t look crafted at all.) The song seems to be taking her where IT needs to go. McDonald does not compromise the voice, ever: it’s clear as a bell, every note perfectly placed, no strain, no sloppiness. She is in exquisite control of her voice. Her voice is how she gets her feelings out. So often with great instruments, the feelings and/or the sense of the lyrics ARE compromised in order to get the sound out. We see this time and time again, we see this on American Idol, where the kids somehow think that SMILING while singing “Stormy Weather” is in any way a valid choice. There is such a thing as a wrong choice. It doesn’t matter if you have amazing pipes if you don’t understand THE JOB.

McDonald’s voice is so flexible and free, with such a breath-driven mix of head voice and chest voice, it can do anything go anywhere, and in the case of “Maybe This Time” the voice is such that it can TAKE the emotions exploding out of her by the end.

But watch her face during the performance of “Maybe This Time”. Watch what’s going on with her, through the whole thing but particularly as she approaches the end end, from minute 2:47 on.

The voice is in control, the feelings are not.

At the 2025 Tony Awards, she performed “Rose’s Turn”. If you were clicked into the theatre community, you followed along with the responses, which were instantaneous. People were blown away, people were critical. People raved, people recoiled. It was one of those moments (and, to be honest, we don’t get many of them any more when so much of entertainment is designed to generate NO strong responses at all, because God forbid we risk offending someone). “Rose’s Turn” is the “To be or not to be” of American musical theatre. It is the soliloquy to end all soliloquies and it can make or break a performer. Nothing will reveal shallowness or phoniness or even trying too hard like “Rose’s Turn”. There is a standard as well: it’s so well-known there are assumptions of what it is, and how it should be done. And so any deviation, an actor who makes another type of choice, can face rejection. Audiences: “no no no I remember it was done THIS way and how dare you make another choice?”

I remember Natasha Richardson playing Sally Bowles on Broadway, a production I saw, and her “take” was so different from Liza Minnelli’s that it did take a second to adjust. To be that bold in interpretation is not for the faint-hearted. You must have the goods and you must have the philosophy behind it: you have to really know what the fuck you are doing and why, in other words. Richardson knew what she was doing. I wrote about that groundbreaking performance when she died.

What happened with that performance was almost unthinkable: I didn’t think once of Liza Minnelli. “Maybe This Time” (speaking of which) completely changed when Richardson sang it. I heard it another way.

The song is the song. The soliloquy is the soliloquy. It’s a TEXT. That’s all. Words on a page.

It takes an actor to bring it to life. And, despite definitive performances, there is no one way to do it.

Audra McDonald’s interpretation of “Rose’s Turn” was unlike any other performance of it I’ve seen and it did the unthinkable (again): it made me hear the song a new way. It almost baffled me, and I did almost reject it – not because it wasn’t good, but because I literally couldn’t TAKE IN what she was doing and where she was going emotionally. She didn’t obliterate other versions but … well, she almost did. She found new depths in the song. She came at it with a different philosophy and backstory. To the naysayers: she is allowed to do that.

And maybe, just maybe, Audra McDonald’s stunning groundbreaking career has earned her the right for you to maybe think, just maybe, she knows best? i.e. She knows what the fuck she is doing and why. And maybe GO WITH IT as opposed to REJECT it because it is NEW. There’s a conservative strain in audiences, particularly those who know their history. This is why radically new interpretations of Shakespeare sometimes meet resistance.

Anyway. I have never seen a performance like this in my life. I still can’t even believe what I am seeing.

Powerful waves pour through Audra McDonald. There is no sea wall to break those waves. There is no barrier. These powerful waves would overwhelm other people, frighten them. When feelings are as huge as a 90-foot wave, many others – including actors – balk. It’s not that they WON’T “go there”, it’s that they CAN’T. This stuff is not for the weak. You must be able to FACE the wave and let it hit. What I’m seeing here with her “Rose’s Turn” is a woman being hit by a 90-foot wave, and singing THROUGH the hugeness of it, the chaos of it. She’s barely holding on. (I felt this in Natasha Richardson’s Sally Bowles too. She was barely holding on.)

Are you tough enough to face what McDonald faces here? Can you accept that maybe, just maybe, she knows what she is doing, and why? And she has courage enough to do it.