{"id":1342,"date":"2024-11-19T10:49:58","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T15:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/?p=1342"},"modified":"2024-11-19T10:49:58","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T15:49:58","slug":"bad-witch-menzel-basks-in-her-good-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/bad-witch-menzel-basks-in-her-good-fortune\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad witch Menzel basks in her good fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Idina Menzel says that when the musical “Rent,” in which she played the flirty, bisexual performance artist Maureen, was making its surprising leap to prominence in the mid-1990s, journalists tended to overplay the similarities between the fresh-faced cast and the young East Village bohemians they were representing onstage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“There were plenty of really, really experienced people in that show,” Menzel says during a lunch break from rehearsals as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, for “Wicked,” which opens at the Curran Theatre later this month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In her particular case, though, “Rent” really was an example of blurred lines between life and art. Menzel was still in her mid-20s when she got the part (for which she’d eventually receive a Tony nomination), living downtown and pursuing a recording career as well as stage work. “It was not only my first Broadway experience but my first really big break,” she says. “No theatrical experience will ever be that way for me again.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That’s true in more ways than one. Not only did Jonathan Larson, the late creator of “Rent,” essentially rewrite the part of Maureen to fit Menzel’s exuberant stage style, but the 31-year-old singer and actress (whose first name is pronounced Ah-DEE-nah) also met her husband, Taye Diggs (of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” fame), in the show. They went on to perform together in the jazz-age musical “The Wild Party” at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Although Menzel’s career hasn’t taken off with the kind of speed that her movie-star husband’s has, her role as Elphaba represents a kind of step up: a lead role in a made-for-Broadway show. That’s nothing to scoff at for a woman who got her start singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs on Long Island. (“It was just a job instead of working at a local deli,” she says, not wanting to put too fine a point on the experience. “I did it for the money.”) She has also released an album of original songs on Hollywood Records and appeared in a handful of independent films, including a small part in “Kissing Jessica Stein.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Besides, she says, she never feels directly competitive with her husband. “I’m an ambitious person, but not in that way. And it makes it easier on a couple if they’re both doing well, you know? I get invested in every job that he’s going up for, and I’m completely devoted to the idea of him being as totally, disgustingly successful as he can. Because he’s the most talented person I know.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Idina Menzel says that when the musical “Rent,” in which she played the flirty, bisexual performance artist Maureen, was making its surprising leap to prominence in the mid-1990s, journalists tended to overplay the similarities between the fresh-faced cast and the young East Village bohemians they were representing onstage. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1343,"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":[37,5],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-37","tag-wicked"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/ratio2x3_960.webp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-lE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","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=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1344,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions\/1344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}