Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the 9\/11 terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of 2,977 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
The attacks left New York City at a standstill for weeks \u2014 but\u00a0just 48 hours after the horrors in Lower Manhattan, all Broadway theaters were re-opened. New York City\u2019s then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani<\/strong>\u00a0saw the Great White Way\u2019s return as a key to the city\u2019s recovery.<\/p>\n One of the performers that night was Tony winner\u00a0Idina Menzel<\/strong>, then a struggling actress.<\/p>\n \u201cI was going into\u00a0Aida\u00a0at the time, and\u2026I was replacing\u00a0Taylor Dayne<\/strong>\u00a0\u2026 I was sort of at a low point in my career, and I was really excited about it,\u201d she recalls to ABC Audio. \u201cAnd then the day I was supposed to get on stage was 9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we finally did come back. I remember my dad was in the audience, and it was quarter filled, people were just not in the mood or weirded out or scared to be in a public space together,\u201d she adds. \u201cAnd it\u2026felt, I remember, awkward to be up there. Is it OK to be singing and celebrating and making the attention about ourselves? But yes, it\u2019s good for people because they\u2026needed to heal.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI remember we all sang \u2018America the Beautiful\u2019 at the curtain call, and I remember my dad was with my husband at the time, he just started bawling, and he\u2019s not a very emotional man. And my\u2026ex-husband\u00a0Taye<\/strong>\u00a0[Diggs<\/strong>], he didn\u2019t know what to do with my father,\u201d Idina recalls, laughing.<\/p>\n She adds, \u201cSo\u2026I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of those kinds of moments and to provide some kind of sanctuary when we\u2019re all going through things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the 9\/11 terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of 2,977 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attacks left New York City at a standstill for weeks \u2014 but\u00a0just 48 hours after the horrors in Lower Manhattan, all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-go","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1017,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions\/1017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}