Idina Menzel Gets Enchanted
On Broadway, Idina Menzel is a superstar, headlining Wicked after her memorable run in Rent. In movies, she’s still paying her dues. The Rent movie recast her as Maureen, but she played second fiddle to Salma Hayek in Ask the Dust. Now in Disney’s Enchanted, she is the real world girlfriend of lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey), doomed to lose to the animated princess come to life.
“I didn’t want to play her as a typical mean girlfriend that everyone’s going to hate,” said Menzel. “I thought it would be more interesting if she had a vulnerability and I knew we were heading there and that she’s going to be funny and have a sweet side to her.”
Though she did not get to play the princess this time out, Enchanted did allow Menzel to live out part of her dream in the surprise ending. “We’ve got to be careful, because we don’t want to be giving away the ending, but I enjoyed it very much,” she teased. “I think Nancy gets a really happy ending that really ties my whole character together.”
Nancy only appears in a few scenes, reinforcing that Robert has a plan for his romantic life. There was a bit more of Nancy that we might see on the DVD. “I was in my fashion design studio and there’s this monologue about giving up on romance and going to the Hamptons and meeting my Prince Charming, and I’m not going to hold my breath type of thing. It’s ridiculous. It was very good and hopefully it will be on the DVD.”
Moviegoing audiences can hear Idina Menzel singing the song over the end credits of Beowulf, but the Disney musical spoof did not take advantage of her Broadway chops. “It’s a compliment really that everybody misses my singing. Nancy was never written with a song, honestly. I think [director] Kevin [Lima] was a fan of mine and honestly it was a compliment to be asked to just be hired on my acting talents alone.”
With her theater days behind her, Menzel has not stopped crooning. She is working on her own musical album, produced by Glen Ballard. “He spent the last year-and-a-half with me writing music and extracting my soul and encouraging me to be a songwriter and helping me to find a way to bridge the gap between theatre and pop, co-wrote almost all the songs on the album, about nine out of 10 of them. It comes out the end of January, and I’m very excited about it. It’s a great personal album and we’ll see what happens.’
Between now and the launch of the album, expect to hear a few selections of music from Menzel, instead of the traditional first single.
“The music industry’s changing so much because they don’t have a leg to stand on these days so they’re constantly trying to come up with all these different things. It used to be that they’d pick one song and all your eggs were in that basket, and if radio didn’t play it, you were like dropped from the label and it was done. Now, because of the internet and having more control over my own career and my audience having more ways to connect with me, they pick like different songs. So they pick a song they think I’ll perform really great on Letterman, and then a song that’s good for radio and then a song that’s maybe more theatrical, and you have the Beowulf thing so it’s more about marketing.”
Even Paris Hilton dropped an album, so Menzel has some stiff competition. Hopefully, music lovers can tell the difference between the real deal and a flash in the pan. “The thing I think that sets me apart is being a songwriter, and there’s not that many women in the theatre who do that, so I’m just trying to go that route. It is a dream of mine, to be in a bus with a bunch of dudes, touring the world. I have to see this through one last time, and it’s so unique that you don’t have to be 18, blonde and in a bustier. I’ve got time being a mature woman and it’s okay and the record label’s really behind me. I’m really lucky. I’m going to give it one more shot because I don’t know how short a time they’ll give me.”
With her film career taking off, Broadway fans are really pulling for a movie version of Wicked. She still played Maureen 10 years later, so why not Elphaba? “But they’re doing so well with the show all over the world now that I think they don’t need to. They have enough publicity, and they’re selling enough tickets that they’ll wait. I was lucky with Rent, to be able to be in that 10 years after doing that. If that happened twice, I would be thanking my lucky stars. Green make up [covers up wrinkles]. I keep telling them that. I keep saying it’s like Peggy Sue Got Married. I could have played an older one and then come back, so I’d love to do that.”
Menzel actually built a little insurance policy into her Broadway performance. “I made sure the keys were really hard, so if you were not a real singer you’d have a hard time. But they always make do with that and they change it and they get in the studio they’ll just find [someone]. I’m not going to cast it for myself.”
Plus, she’s done so much Wicked that she can take a break from it for a while. “I went back because one of my girlfriends Julia Murney was in a New York production I did – The Wild Party, a show I did at the Manhattan Theatre Club. (The Andrew Lippa version). I wanted to support her, but I went back to London and did it for five months. … I want to support the show because I love what it says and I want it to be on forever, but I just need to take a break.”
With two landmark plays on her resume, Menzel is hard pressed to think of another theatrical performance that would equal the last two. “You know, I’ve always wanted to do Funny Girl, but I never would. I’ve thought about it, it’s been talked about, and I think it would probably be a career disaster. It’s her (Streisand’s), and it’s never been revived and there’s a reason for that. It’s so iconic. I mean, the first line of the show is, ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ I mean, how do you get up there and make that your own? Then they think you’re trying to make it too much your own. That’s one thing I think of. I think of Evita sometimes. Mostly I feel like I’ve set a standard for myself in originating roles in really important musicals, and I feel really lucky to have done that, so I’m looking all the time at my manager at finding new original stories or women who have not been portrayed yet on stage.”