NEW INTERVIEWS

An awesome new interview was published in today’s edition of the Los Angeles Times. Read on to find out about Idina’s tour and what her future may hold.

As a wedding singer in the 1980s, Idina Menzel came up with a crowd-pleasing formula: trot out a broad range of familiar songs, keep the party moving and the banter light.

But the actress, who has since won a Tony Award for “Wicked” on Broadway and starred in stage and movie versions of “Rent” and on Fox’s hit comedy “Glee,” had to rein in her now-famous big voice. She was supposed to be background music in those days, after all, not the main attraction.

Menzel smiled recently when she thought about that time, and not just because she fibbed about her age to land jobs around her native Long Island, N.Y. (She was 15 when she started, but told her band mates she was 18). The experience was great, if cheesy, she said, of the time when she moved from the music of the Police to Motown to Cole Porter and to the bossa nova. She wanted to be a rock star then, but out of necessity she became more of an entertainment jack-of-all-trades. As it turns out, that’s worked in her favor.

In a national tour she launched earlier this year, Menzel’s playing cabaret-style concerts with full orchestras, singing Broadway show tunes, original songs she wrote for her most recent CD, “I Stand,” and pop standards. There’s also ad-libbed patter between songs but, Menzel promises, “no shtick — I think I’ll have a lifelong aversion to that from all those weddings and bar mitzvahs.”

Read more…

Read another short interview with Idina about Wicked and Kristin Chenoweth in the LA Times here.

And yet another with the Orange County Register here.

2 thoughts on “NEW INTERVIEWS

  1. Make sure you tune in, Michele! It’s Idina’s PBS special, “Sound Stage” that was recorded/aired back in 2008. It’s wonderful!

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