Broadway star Idina Menzel doesn\u2019t have a long list of dream roles she hopes to play some day.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really think that I want those roles that haven\u2019t been written yet,\u201d she said in a telephone interview. \u201cI really want to originate roles. I\u2019ve had so much success with that process, and I love it very much \u2014 just having the privilege of being with the writers, with the creative team, in the privacy of their home while they\u2019re working and being given that window into what they\u2019re doing. It\u2019s a beautiful thing for me, and to watch it unfold is very rewarding.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019s intimately familiar with all of that. She was involved early on in both \u201cRent\u201d and \u201cWicked,\u201d creating the roles of self-involved performance artist Maureen Johnson in the former and the powerful, misunderstood enchantress Elphaba in the latter. She was nominated for a Tony for \u201cRent,\u201d and won for \u201cWicked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other bullet points from her career: She has a recurring role in \u201cGlee\u201d as Rachel Barry\u2019s birth mom, and has also appeared in a few episodes of her husband Taye Diggs\u2019 medical drama \u201cPrivate Practice.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019ll take a musical journey through her career in a Majestic Theatre concert next week. It\u2019s part of a national tour to promote her terrific new CD and DVD, \u201cIdina Menzel Live: Barefoot at the Symphony.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the highlights of the CD is her rendering of \u201cNo Day But Today,\u201d one of the songs in \u201cRent.\u201d It concludes with a moving call-and-response between Menzel and the audience of \u201cNo day but today.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not religious, but it is sort of like a prayer,\u201d she said. \u201cI use it as a meditation and a reminder whenever I\u2019m performing to take in the moment and be aware of where I am and what I\u2019ve accomplished and that kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The song, she said, \u201cis the finale song (in \u2018Rent\u2019), and it\u2019s hauntingly perfect because we lost (creator) Jonathan Larson so early in that process, and we had to sing that song like a mantra every night. It has a very deep significance for us. Art was imitating life for us every night while we were onstage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Larson died the day of the show\u2019s first preview performance to its off-Broadway run.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t cancel,\u201d Menzel recalled. \u201cWe canceled the ticket buyers, but everybody that knew him came to the theater, and we said, \u2018We are going to sing through the music’; we didn\u2019t do the staging. We just did it as a catharsis, as a healing thing for anybody that wanted to come by. By Act II, it turned into a celebration of him; it took on a life of its own.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Majestic audience can expect to hear something from \u201cRent\u201d as well as \u201cDefying Gravity,\u201d her signature song from \u201cWicked.\u201d That song, too, has a lot of meaning for her.<\/p>\n
\u201cFinding a new song in your voice is interesting \u2014 sometimes, it feels very foreign,\u201d she said. \u201cBut that song was just there for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show felt special to her personally from the beginning, she said, but she didn\u2019t sense that it had the potential to be as huge as it did.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just knew it made me feel something inside and that I connected to it in a deep, deep way when I sang the music,\u201d she said. \u201cI would leave the audition and just cry, I wanted it so badly, and I felt so connected to the journey of Elphaba.\u201d<\/p>\n
In concert, she\u2019ll also sing some pop music and a few standards, and she\u2019ll share stories from her life. \u201cI\u2019m coming from a place where these are songs that I\u2019ve been dying to sing or songs that chronicle my life that I want to revisit and explore with the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Broadway star Idina Menzel doesn\u2019t have a long list of dream roles she hopes to play some day. \u201cI really think that I want those roles that haven\u2019t been written yet,\u201d she said in a telephone interview. \u201cI really want to originate roles. I\u2019ve had so much success […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[28,6,4],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-28","tag-barefoot-summer-tour-2012","tag-rent"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/2012_06_06_sanantonio.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6Srnq-13","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":347,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}