FROZEN IN TIME
Menzel has conflicting thoughts on huge hit
Idina Menzel will always remember performing Let it Go at the Oscars in 2014, but not for the reasons you might expect. The anthem from Frozen, for which Menzel voiced the lead character Elsa, won the award for best original song that night.
Menzel, a Broadway veteran who will reprise the role of Elsa for the sequel, says that at the height of the hysteria surrounding the Disney animation, she felt as if she was leading a double life. “It was such a strange dichotomy,” she says. “There was this thing of having worked so hard my whole life and finally having this huge song. To be at the Oscars, and to have all the glamour of that …”
She pauses. “And then to come home and have to go to mediation with my ex, figuring out which days he was visiting our son and where we were going, and the sadness, and the regret. It was …” Not a great time? She laughs. “I mean, it was rich. It was rich; it was full.”
Just as Frozen was becoming a massive success, Menzel’s decadelong marriage to the actor Taye Diggs, with whom she starred in Rent, was ending. She was also doing eight shows a week in the Broadway production If/Then, making life hectic.
“My career is what makes me feel confident,” she says. “To feel self-sufficient and like I don’t need a man to support me and all that kind of stuff makes me feel good about myself. It’s just, you know …” Another pause. “Everyone talks about me being a role model for young girls and that’s not always the truth in my day-today personal life. I’m not constantly practising what I preach. I’m a little uncomfortable carrying that banner. I’m not always ‘Oh, I feel so great about myself today. I’m a powerful, confident woman, and I’m not going to care what anyone else thinks of me!’” Menzel laughs. “I can be a mess. The older I get, I get wiser about some things, and yet I get more fragile and vulnerable about others.”
Menzel, 45, is a go-to actress for producers looking for a feisty female lead: be it Elsa letting it go; Elphaba defying gravity in Wicked; or Maureen protesting her way through Rent. It was the original 1996 Broadway production of Rent that gave Menzel — the daughter of a pyjama salesman and a psychotherapist — her first professional role, after a Long Island, N.Y., childhood spent singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Menzel’s new album, Idina, is her fifth record in 20 years but her first prominent release since Frozen. She says it’s not a deliberate attempt to break out alone after her successes in ensembles on Broadway or unseen in Frozen.
“I don’t know if it’s breaking out,” she says. “It’s just me. It’s a new beginning. It’s an album where I explore a lot of things that have been going on in my life. It’s been a turbulent couple of years, with some great stuff and not so great stuff, so a lot of people will feel like they get to know me on a first-name basis.”
The first single, I See You, is an empowering ballad for “those who got lost along the way.” Queen of Swords is a pop tune that wouldn’t be out of place on a Taylor Swift album (the two performed Let it Go on Swift’s tour last year). Perfect Story, which features the lyrics “I’m sorry I didn’t give you the textbook happy ending,” is clearly an apology to her seven-year-old son for getting divorced from his father.
“I have a lot of guilt about that,” she says. “I come from divorced parents and I said I wouldn’t ever do it. … I want to do the right thing by my son, and that means balancing my work and my quality time with him. I know he needs to grow up seeing a really happy, confident mother, then he’ll be drawn to those kinds of women.”
Playing the part of the happy, confident mother appears to be the role of her life, but it’s her vulnerability that makes Menzel such an endearing performer, and that sets her rendition of Let it Go apart from the countless cover versions that have since sprung up.
She says she has spent a lot of time beating herself up, surrounding herself with judgmental people.
“I wish I could put on more of a front and a facade and not be quite so transparent,” she says. “But it’s exhausting trying to be someone else.”
In Frozen, Menzel portrayed a tormented ice queen. In person, she could hardly be warmer. She says she still loves performing Let it Go, despite the painful memories it evokes.
“I won’t ever look a gift horse in the mouth,” she says. “I just feel bad that some parents may be sick of me because of it.”