How do you start conceptualizing a tour?<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n I start imagining and thinking about new songs and talking to my music director about arrangements and thinking about the band and what kind of instrumentation I want to have. A lot of dreaming about things. And also what I want to divulge \u2014 what kind of stories I want to tell that underscore the music.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do you prepare for the challenges of a solo concert?<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n I prepare vocally. I\u2019m pretty regimented about that. I build up to being able to be on stage for two hours and sing 20 songs and have fun with it and not feel exhausted vocally and physically. I have a coach I\u2019ve had for over 30 years. I start to look at all the music with her and any of the pitfalls or parts of the songs that are more challenging and can tire me out if I don\u2019t think about them technically right.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do you juggle touring and parenthood? [Menzel has a 14-year-old son, Walker Nathaniel, with ex-husband, actor Taye Diggs, 53.]<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n Each tour is a different stage of my son\u2019s life. In the beginning, I had a little baby on the road and I was breastfeeding, and two years from that, I had a toddler and I was fitting in children\u2019s museums and the proper park to coincide with the city. Now he\u2019s a teenager and probably just wants to bring a friend or two on the bus because that\u2019s cool to be on a tour bus. I have to figure in: <\/span>How often can I run home in between shows so I can make a basketball game or a parent-teacher conference or something?<\/i> So that juggling has a lot to do with it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Both you and your son\u2019s father, Taye, can sing. Does Walker have a good voice?<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n I\u2019m ashamed \u2014 well, not ashamed \u2014 I\u2019m flabbergasted to tell you that I\u2019ve not heard much of my son\u2019s voice. I\u2019ve heard very little. I\u2019ve heard enough to know that he sings very much in tune and has a great ear, but he will not \u2014 ever since he was like 5 years old \u2014 he won\u2019t let his dad or me hear him sing. It\u2019s really such a disappointment, because I always say, \u201cCome on, honey, just sing with me in the car. We can just harmonize, you don\u2019t have to perform. Singing is fun.\u201d But he\u2019s so adamant about paving his own road, and I don\u2019t want to push that. He\u2019s an athlete, and he loves to dance. He\u2019ll dance a lot in front of us, and he\u2019s a super creative writer. When he came to see my show [the play <\/span>Redwood<\/i>] in La Jolla, [California], he said, \u201cMom, you know I can\u2019t stand musicals, but this was really good.\u201d I said, \u201cWell, that\u2019s good, because these musicals actually pay for a lot of the things that you like to do.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You were already singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs when you were just a couple of years older than your son is now. What would you tell that 16-year-old wedding singer now?<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n It\u2019s more what she tells me as a 53-year-old-woman. I look back and I remember her being so fearless and her having such faith and belief in who she was and what she was going to accomplish. That version of me knew deep down inside that her dreams were going to come true and that she deserved to be heard and had something special to offer. Not to say she wasn\u2019t insecure about so many things, but the talent stuff, I believed in myself so much to the point that I would be standing up there at a microphone at some temple in Great Neck, Long Island, and I knew no one was listening to me, but I had this sense of saying, <\/span>One day you\u2019ll listen to me<\/i>. The more successful you get in life, the further you can fall. \u2026 So I\u2019d say, \u201cI\u2019m so proud of you. Keep believing in yourself.\u201d And I probably would tell her, \u201cDon\u2019t care about what people think of you so much.\u201d Which I still have not escaped. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever not care what people think of me.<\/p>\n In a previous interview, you said turning 50 was difficult and that you\u2019re fighting the aging process. Is that still true?<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n It depends on the day of the week. I read some interviews by other female performers that I love, and a lot of them will say, \u201cOh, I don\u2019t care, I am embracing my smile lines and my wrinkles,\u201d and I envy that. It\u2019s hard for me. I love more of the wisdom I have about life and about keeping things in perspective and enjoying the moment and my creative process. All of those things are much better as a more mature woman. It\u2019s just the aesthetic thing and seeing things sag. Also, it\u2019s hard in this day and age with all the social media to feel relevant and that you still have something to offer and that you\u2019re not always sort of behind. I\u2019m always asking my son, when I say [something], \u201cIs that totally uncool?\u201d And then when I do say something I think is cool, then he\u2019s like, \u201cMom, you can\u2019t say that. That sounds ridiculous.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Any dream projects on your list, or collaborators you\u2019d still love to act or sing with?<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n I\u2019d love to share the screen with a legendary actor that I can learn so much from. I\u2019m listening to Barbra Streisand\u2019s\u00a0[<\/span>My Name Is Barbra<\/i>] book on Audible. I would love to work with her. I\u2019d love her to direct something that I was in. I auditioned for something that Robert De Niro was doing, and I got close to getting that, and that would have been pretty incredible. I\u2019ve always said that. And Bono or Sting. I guess I could think of some younger people, but hey, it\u2019s AARP!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Broadway veteran says, \u2018It\u2019s hard in this day and age with all the social media to feel relevant\u2019 Idina Menzel, 53, is a Tony award\u2013winning Broadway star, but she admits that she battles self-doubt and performance anxiety. As she prepares to hit the road on a musical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1268,"comment_status":"closed","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":[80,82],"class_list":["post-1267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-80","tag-take-me-or-leave-me-tour"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/1140-qq-idinamenzel-promo.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-kr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267","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=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1269,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions\/1269"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}