The role that Audra McDonald, Broadway’s GOAT, would kill to play

Learning to tap dance from famed choreographer Savion Glover for the 2016 Broadway show Shuffle Along was hard enough, but Broadway superstar Audra McDonald somehow found herself doing the high-octane choreography while nearly seven months pregnant.

“It was really hard, and my body was screaming at me to stop,” McDonald says. “I had all these belly bands underneath my costumes to hold my belly in place. My knees were swelling, and so they were having to drain fluid from my knees, which then would make them lighter than I was used to,” she says.

Six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald at Hamer HallCredit: Simon Schluter

“For the Tony performance, they had drained my knee that afternoon because it had gotten so filled with fluid. When I did the kick that night … my legs flew up much higher than I expected. It was like picking up a bag that you think is full and it’s empty. All that craziness, you know, plus being 46. It was just an absolutely crazy time. The show must go on.”

“The show must go on” is deeply ingrained in McDonald, who knew she wanted to make theatre her life when she stepped on stage at a dinner theatre event at age nine, and is touring Australia in May. “I like to say that I got plugged into the right charger,” she says. If you start counting at that nine-year-old debut, McDonald has been doing this for 44 years. If you want to start counting from her Broadway debut in The Secret Garden, it’s been 32 years.

Even after all that time, though, McDonald still gets stage fright. Some days, she says, “I don’t feel good. I’ll go out there and do what I can, and it’s not amazing, and that’s OK. It’s like expecting – not that I’m comparing myself to Simone Biles – but it’s like expecting Simone Biles to stick the landing every single time. Sometimes, even Simone Biles falls.”

McDonald might not compare herself to Simone Biles, but musical theatre cognoscenti would, in that she is known as the greatest of all time. She has the most Tony Awards of any performer in history (six) and is the only Broadway actor to win acting and supporting acting awards in both musicals and plays. She also has two Grammys and an Emmy, for good measure.

Tony-winning actor and singer Audra McDonald at Hamer HallCredit: Simon Schluter

McDonald’s name is rumoured to be attached to one of the most iconic roles in all of musical theatre: Mama Rose in Gypsy, a role written for the great Ethel Merman that has been played by Angela Lansbury, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone and Imelda Staunton. So is there a Gypsy revival in the works, and is McDonald about to put her stamp on the role?

“It’s a role I would kill to play,” McDonald says, then laughs. “OK, I wouldn’t kill anybody, but it’s a role I would love to play someday.”

Someday might be sooner than she’s letting on, but right now she’s focused on her world concert tour. She’s just finished up in New Zealand and is going to perform one night in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. Although concerts don’t require as much research (or tap dancing) as some theatrical roles, they have their own challenges.

“There’s no script, it’s me, Audra McDonald up there, communicating and being with my audience,” she says. “But as I then perform each song, each song is a mini musical to me, I need to make sure there’s a why, make sure I understand what’s happening, what I’m trying to accomplish, what the character is trying to accomplish within the song.”

After her whistlestop tour of Australia, she’s heading back to the US, and back into the corsets of The Gilded Age, which starts filming its third season two weeks after she lands. She’s also starred in The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight, among other non-singing television roles. When she set her sights on Broadway, she never thought she’d end up doing drama on TV, but she’s enjoyed the process of learning a different kind of acting.

“I’ve enjoyed the projects I’ve been able to be a part of, but I feel like I lucked into being in all of them. I’m the luckiest woman in the world. I’ve been on two television shows with Christine Baranski – who’s luckier than I am?”

Audra McDonald performs at Crown Perth on May 4; Her Majesty’s Theatre Adelaide on May 8; the Sydney Opera House on May 11; QPAC in Brisbane on May 15; and Hamer Hall in Melbourne on May 17.

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