Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

American Songbook (review)

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2006.0045

1086-332X

David L. Roman,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Audra McDonald, the celebrated four-time Tony Award winner, opened the 2005 Lincoln Center American Songbook series with a recital showcasing a diverse range of contemporary composers. A ten-member ensemble led by her musical director, Ted Sperling, accompanied McDonald. The song selection ranged from pop classics from such noted [End Page 734] songwriters as Stevie Wonder and Randy Newman to the less familiar work of Michael John LaChiusa and Adam Guettel. McDonald generally performs and records the songs of these latter composers, who represent a new generation of musical theatre songwriters challenging the divide between the popular and classical. McDonald is unquestionably the most successful interpreter of these new American composers, talented figures who also include Ricky Ian Gordon, Stephen Flaherty, and Lynn Ahrens. In fact, only six months earlier, in June 2004, McDonald premiered a program at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, based on the commissions from many of these same composers, who contributed to a dramatic song recital based on the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Lincoln Center recital, however, allowed McDonald to display her impressive vocal range across a broader array of popular musical genres and freed her to sing material outside her standard repertoire of new and traditional musical theatre songs. Ever since her brilliant Broadway debut in the gorgeous 1993 Nicholas Hytner revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel at Lincoln Center, in which she played the role of Carrie Pipperidge, earning her first Tony Award, McDonald has demonstrated a vocal agility that is both lyrical and dramatic. In her interpretations, she creates theatrical worlds deeply felt and artistically coherent, a skill few singers are able to accomplish, let alone master. She brings to mind no one less than the veteran performer Barbara Cook, perhaps the most effective interpreter of and advocate for the American songbook. Like Cook, McDonald's voice is emotionally expressive and thoroughly adept at showcasing the inherent and organic drama of the song. A trained soprano, McDonald's remarkable voice is also versatile; she uses the lower registers to full dramatic effect, building in momentum as she ascends the scales to reach the higher luminous notes. But she can easily reverse this approach even within the same song; her stunning interpretation of Laura Nyro's nerve-wracking "Tom Cat Goodbye" was performed as a musical soliloquy, beautifully capturing the emotional intensity of this complex song of vengeance while displaying her own tremendous vocal and interpretive talent in the process. Never once did she sing at the expense of a song's clarity. McDonald always serves the songs she sings by bringing out their lyrical intelligibility and musical nuance, whether in complicated narratives such as Nyro's "Tom Cat Goodbye" or more straightforward sentiments such as Stevie Wonder's joyful "Happier than the Morning Sun." While McDonald organized the Carnegie Hall concert around the Seven Deadly Sins, the Lincoln Center concert conformed to no such narrative or thematic logic. The evening's eclectic selection of songs proved both suspenseful and surprising. McDonald possesses an immensely charismatic and thoroughly understated stage persona. At once elegant and casual, McDonald played the recently opened Rose Hall at Columbus Circle, the new home for the Jazz at Lincoln Center series, as if she were in a more intimate cabaret space such as Joe's Pub. She joked with her musical director, shared anecdotes about her life and career, and acknowledged songwriters in the audience. And yet she rarely identified a song before she sang it, preferring instead to accentuate the elements of anticipation and surprise held by her captive listeners. (In fact, the audience was not given a musical program listing the nearly twenty songs performed until the end of the evening.) Rufus Wainwright, whose clever and engaging songs "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" and "Damned Ladies" were performed earlier on in the recital, has been described as someone who should be writing for the...