"Divas at the Donmar"

Audra McDonald

Music director/director  Ted Sperling
Bass                     Pete Donovan
Drums                    Mike Smith

The Divas at the Donmar are Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald and Sam Brown.
Brown, someone unkindly said, is more Ealing Broadway than Broadway, but
there's no doubting LuPone's credentials as a diva. McDonald is more of a
puzzle. She photographs as enigmatically beautiful and very young, the sort
of personality that might sell chart-topping slush. But her solo CD
consists of tough contemporary art songs by comparatively little known
young composers, performed with amazing intelligence. In one sense at
least, she isn't a diva -- you get the song, the music and words, for all
their worth, not her performing.

On stage she is at first less enigmatic, just strikingly beautiful, poised
and healthy-looking. But as she comments during the (commendably brief)
links that three of her four Broadway roles have been mothers, two of them
murderous, even though she's not yet thirty, you get a sense of an ageless
presence and experience, that adds style and even substance to the
fluffiest fluff. She made Just a little bit in love, from Bernstein's
Wonderful town, at least not embarrassing, and found an alarming hilarity
in Adam Guettel's setting of Thackeray's A tragic tale ("the pigtail hung
behind him").

In the rest of programme of songs on her CD and songs by the composers of
American music theatre classics, McDonald showed an incredible technical
and emotional range. She delivered exemplary versions of Broadway
standards, including Someone to watch over me (almost whinge-free) and, as
an encore, Fascinating rhythm. and a bitterly funny, semi-demented Mistress
of the Senator (I can do Jackie better than Jackie and I won't wear a hat).
But she found searing anger for two settings by Ricky Ian Gordon of poems
by Langston Hughes, Dream variations and Song for a black girl, and Irving
Berlin's amazing Suppertime. (This song was first sung by Ethel Waters in
As thousands cheer, in the character of a woman who can't bring herself to
lay the table for supper because, it emerges, her husband has been
lynched.) And McDonald sang several sweet, not in the least mumsy,
lullabies.

Although she made The man that got away, if anything, even more
heartbreaking than Judy Garland did, and acknowledged Garland's influence,
she doesn't have the manic edge or sense of danger. She also gave Streisand
a name-check, as another follower of Garland, but again, McDonald doesn't
emote over the top. Instead, she makes gives every word and note exactly
their emotional force in context.

McDonald's run at the Donmar finishes on Saturday 28 August, and is already
sold out. I hope that encourages her to come back.

Incidentally, the programme for this series is a pure waste of a shilling.
It contains "interviews" with the singers indistinguishable from the puffs
in the papers, and credits for the (very good) backing group, but no hit of
the programme. I suppose the Donmar, which has less than 200 seats and
covers 60% of its costs from tickets, needs the money.