Original Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune Broadway Review
Given her 6 Tony Awards, two Grammys, an Emmy and a National Medal of Arts, Audra McDonald has nothing left to prove.
Yet there she is in "Frankie & Johnny in the Clair de Lune," having noisy, simulated sexual practice with Michael Shannon, and walking about, at 48, in her altogether suit.
She looks wonderful, but information technology begs the question: Why? Why put yourself out in that location like that?
"You're ever looking to challenge yourself," she tells The Mail in her dressing room, extravagantly eyelashed and outfitted afterwards taping a Tv talk bear witness. "The nudity, the graphic sexuality . . . all of it scared me to death!
"Maybe I'm a masochist," she says, "but I similar leaning into things that scare me, considering that usually means there's something to learn." And since her last bear witness, 2016'south "Shuffle Along," was a musical, she says she wanted to go in some other direction and practise a straight play.
The offer to portray Terrence McNally's wary, weary waitress came "out of the blueish," she says, in an electronic mail from the playwright'due south producer/hubby, Tom Kirdahy.
"Audra," he wrote, " 'Frankie & Johnny' with Michael Shannon . . . What do you think?"
McDonald didn't hesitate. She'd starred in McNally'southward "Master Class" and "Ragtime," and admired Shannon for years, ever since he played "the scary beau" of 2002's Eminem movie, "eight Mile."
"It was the biggest 'Yes!' of my life," she says, laughing. "Well, one of them." When Will Swenson asked her to marry him, "I said yes before he fifty-fifty got the question out!"
She says her husband of seven years had no problem with her performing nude, having bared all himself a decade agone in "Hair." Swenson's Mormon family unit fifty-fifty flew in from Utah to run across him.
"They were incredibly supportive," says McDonald, who grew up in Fresno, Calif., in a family of musicians before coming to New York to study at Juilliard. (These days, she has homes in the city and Westchester County.)
However, she says, she was nervous about having her mother run into the opening dark of "F & J."
"I told her, 'If you don't want to meet it, I'll sympathise,' " McDonald says. "But she came and said, 'Well, it was merely what you'd said it would be.' "
The reason she tin can play the office, McDonald says, is because neither the nudity nor the sex in McNally's 1987 play is costless. "Information technology'southward and then necessary to tell the story," McDonald says. "Once you lot walk onstage, you're in it — you're the grapheme."
As Edie Falco, who played Frankie on Broadway 17 years ago (and fell in dearest with her Johnny, Stanley Tucci) told her: "Subsequently the beginning five minutes of the show, you'll get used to information technology."
Then again, the "Sopranos" star hadn't had a baby 2 ¹/₂ years before, as McDonald had. "I gained a adept 60 pounds when I was pregnant with Sally and figured information technology would come off when it did," says McDonald, who's yet nursing Sally and whose other child, Zoe, is now xviii.
Those pounds are gone. The only "dieting" she says she did was to steer articulate from the cookies at the craft table while shooting her TV serial "The Good Fight." (She'll kickoff filming Flavor four of that show afterwards "F & J" ends its run.)
"I still accept that baby belly, but I don't care," she says. "These characters are center-aged, broken people. You can't play this office and retrieve, 'Well, I'm going to get as gorgeous and skinny and buff as I tin,' because that'due south actually missing the bespeak."
She credits the show'due south intimacy coach, Claire Warden, for making sure she and Shannon were comfortable finessing their sex activity scenes. And an all-female crew — director, lighting chief and phase manager — also made for what McDonald calls "a very rubber surround with a lot of communication, a lot of trust."
If only some members of the audience could exist trusted as well.
"Sometimes we run across people with binoculars," McDonald says, "and the cellphone problem is but . . ." She shrugs. "I don't remember anyone's audacious enough to take pictures with a flash, simply we have a swell front-of-staff that'south doing everything they can to get the phones or stop them." For now, she says, one of the biggest challenges is eating that meatloaf sandwich Johnny gives her afterward they make honey.
"It doesn't have any sugar in it and it's on gluten-gratuitous breadstuff," McDonald says. "Merely on a two-testify twenty-four hour period . . ." She laughs. "Information technology's not piece of cake!"
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Source: https://s150.does-it.net/2019/06/20/audra-mcdonald-on-stage-nudity-sex-it-scared-me-to-death/
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