Audra McDonald Comes To The Stage At Van Wezel

Audra McDonald brings her luminous soprano and incomparable gift for dramatic truth-telling to the Van Wezel on Sun. Nov. 6, 2011 @ 7:00 PM.

Audra McDonald is equally at home on Broadway and opera stages as in roles on film and television. In the summer of 2011, after four seasons playing Dr. Naomi Bennett on ABC's hit television series Private Practice, Audra turned her attention back to live performances, making her role debut as the title character in a new musical adaptation of the Gershwins' folk opera, Porgy and Bess. The production - co-starring Norm Lewis as Porgy and David Alan Grier as Sportin' Life, and directed by the Tony-nominated Diane Paulus - ran from August to the end of September at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. and is slated to begin previews at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in NYC in December, marking McDonald's first Broadway appearance since 2007, when she received a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for her performance in 110 in the Shade. Between runs in Cambridge and New York, Audra embarks on a twenty-city concert tour across North America, presenting her trademark mix of show tunes, classic songs from movies, and pieces written expressly for her by leading contemporary composers.

Audra entered the spotlight when she earned an unprecedented three Tony Awards before the age of 30. The first was just one year after graduating from the Julliard School for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, for Carousel at Lincoln Center Theater. She received two additional Tony Awards in the Featured Actress category over the next four years for her performances in the Broadway premieres of Terrence McNally's play Master Class (1996) and his musical Ragtime (1998), In 2004 she won her fourth Tony, starring with Sean "Diddy" Combs in A Raisin in the Sun. Other theater credits include The Secret Garden (1993), Marie Christine (1999), Henry IV (2004) and, most recently, her Public Theater "Shakespeare in the Park" debut in Twelfth Night alongside Anne Hathaway and Raúl Esparza (2009). McDonald made her opera debut in 2006 at Houston Grand Opera, which featured her in a double-bill of Poulenc's monodrama La Voix Humaine and the world premiere of Send. Her Los Angeles Opera debut in 2007 starring with Patti LuPone in John Doyle's production of Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny resulted in the recording that won McDonald two Grammy Awards- Best Opera Recording and Best Classical Album. She has sung with some of the most famous orchestras and conductors in the world.

It was the Peabody Award-winning CBS program Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years that first introduced McDonald to television audiences as a dramatic actress. She went on to co-star with Kathy Bates and Victor Garber in the lauded 1999 Disney/ABC television remake of Annie, and in 2000 she had a recurring role on NBC's hit series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. After receiving her first Emmy nomination for her performance in the HBO film version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson, McDonald returned to network television in 2003 in the political drama Mister Sterling. In early 2006 she joined the cast of the WB's The Bedford Diaries, and over the next season she had a recurring role on NBC's television series Kidnapped. In 2008 she reprised her Tony-winning role in A Raisin in the Sun in a made-for-television movie adaption, earning her a second Emmy Award nomination.

For more information and to buy tickets, contact the Van Wezel Box office at (941) 953-3368 or log onto www.vanwezel.org.