Audra McDonald gives moving performance with symphony
This review could begin and end in a single sentence: If you weren’t in Uihlein Hall at the Marcus Center to hear Audra McDonald’s fabulous performance with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Wednesday, you missed a rare experience.
While the above sentence is true, it doesn’t give the sixtime Tony winner her due.
First things first: McDonald can sing. Her pitch and rhythm are spot on at all times, regardless of the style or range of the material she’s singing. She sings with complete control but never sounds as though she’s working to control anything. What the audience hears is music and passion, and lots of both.
Lots of singers have great pitch and rhythm, but few have a vocal range that reaches from the soprano stratosphere to a throaty mezzo sound and a deep, warm croon — and all focused, colorful and pure. She does.
McDonald has the musical and theatrical sensibilities to weave a multidimensional tapestry of songs drawn from the entire span of the Great American Songbook, and most of the past century or so, into a seamless, beautifully balanced, involving program that flows from humor to heartbreak, inspiration to reflection, and love to loathing.
Backed by the MSO and three of her band members, and led by her music director Andy Einhorn, McDonald created a unique world with each song. She relied not on over-thetop theatrical shenanigans, but on deeply personal, dynamic, communicative delivery and relaxed introductions, giving each song context in time, in the genres of musical theater and film, and within her own life.
She delivered a smoking, swinging “Cornet Man,” a roof-raising “Climb Every Mountain,” a raging, darkly hilarious “Facebook Song,” a tender “I Won’t Mind,” and an entrancing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
McDonald included a few homages during the course of her performance, including a lovely “Vanilla Ice Cream” from “She Loves Me!” to honor the great Barbara Cook, and “Being Good Isn’t Good Enough” from “Hallelujah, Baby!” to honor the great women performers upon whose shoulders she stands.
McDonald was completely invested in every word she spoke and in each note she sang, creating a magnetic presence and the astonishing illusion that she was playing to a small cabaret audience seated at casual tables, rather than about 1,800 patrons neatly lined up in the tiers and rows of a large, formal concert hall.