Acting, singing, comedy \u2013 Idina Menzel can do it all, and that includes severe self-doubt. It has a lot to do with her parents.<\/p>\n
Idina Menzel is one of the biggest names in musical theatre, having appeared in Rent on Broadway and Wicked in the West End, as well as a film actress, starring most recently in Disney fantasy, Enchanted. She is also a recording artist, her latest, mostly self-penned album, I Stand, being produced by Glen Ballard, the man who helped Alanis Morissette sell 16 million copies of Jagged Little Pill.<\/p>\n
So which is the real Idina Menzel \u2013 the nice Jewish girl from Long Island: the turbo-lunged diva singing flawless power ballads in musicals, or the \u201cedgy little rocker\u201d (her words) whose gritty performances on I Stand put her more in the Sheryl Crow category of raunchy female singer-songwriters? It turns out the answer could be all of them because Menzel fancies herself as a bit of a Renaissance woman.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel comfortable being all those things,\u201d she says. She cites Bette Midler\u2019s as an example of a successfully eclectic career. \u201cOne minute she\u2019s singing Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, the next she\u2019s Janis Joplin [Midler played a character based on the late wild \u201960s rocker in 1979 movie The Rose] or doing some comedy shtick.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Menzel goes on the road in the United States, it is with a similar spirit of diversity, with some vocal acrobatics here and some bawdy anecdotes there, which come as a shock to her teenage female fans who loved her as Elphaba the witch in Wicked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to fight that on tour,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m 37-years-old, and I don\u2019t want to have to censor myself. I can sometimes be a little crass. I\u2019ll curse or make a sexual joke and there might be a 12-year-old girl there with her mom who\u2019s travelled four hours to the gig. So I\u2019ll say: \u2018Sorry, mom, hold her ears\u2019 and keep going! Being a role model is about being true to myself. Besides, the kids who come to my shows are pretty sophisticated.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs an artist you have to express yourself,\u201d she continues. \u201cI make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias but I love rock\u2019n\u2019roll and jazz standards. I\u2019m just lucky that on this album I had a great producer who used the spectrum of my talents to find a cohesive way to present them to the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
Menzel is not as self-assured as this makes her sound. In fact, despite rapturous acclaim for her singing and acting, she is wracked with self-doubt. There is even a song about it on her album called My Own Worst Enemy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about how hard I am on myself,\u201d she says, \u201chow I\u2019m constantly trying to get rid of the conversation in my head that always starts whenever I try to do something.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why is she so insecure? \u201cAll performers get on stage because they need to feel love from an audience,\u201d she explains. \u201cI might appear confident, but those three seconds before I get out there I\u2019m a mess. But I have to take the risk otherwise I\u2019d be miserable and would feel like I wasn\u2019t seeing through my personal destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n
What goes through her mind in those three seconds?
\n\u201cI\u2019ll think: \u2018I have to pee\u2019 or \u2018I don\u2019t know the lyrics\u2019 or \u2018Why do I do this, this isn\u2019t fun.\u2019 And then I\u2019ll think: \u2018Go out and do it for that little girl who came to see you.’\u201d
\nMenzel describes her struggle to overcome her neuroses as \u201ca battle\u201d. \u201cIt\u2019s a battle to make the positive win out, that part of me that has kept me going since I was a kid that made me feel I had something special to give.\u201d<\/p>\n
The daughter of a psychotherapist mother and pyjama-salesman father, Menzel\u2019s cosy suburban world was shattered by their divorce when she was 16. Another song on I Stand \u2013 I Feel Everything \u2013 confronts this turbulent period in her adolescence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a song about that feeling you get as a kid, coming home to a house that\u2019s explosive and you don\u2019t know what to expect, whether or not you\u2019re going to walk into a room of darkness where someone\u2019s screaming at you. It\u2019s about that hyper-sensitivity you develop as a kid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her parents\u2019 divorce was, she says, \u201ca big surprise\u201d. Not having her dad at home made her feel bereft. Then she had to contend with a mum who, she says, tended to \u201cwear her heart on her sleeve\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes I\u2019d come home to lights out and she\u2019d be up in her room, with a really bad headache. There was that sheer fear of not knowing what to expect.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had very loving parents who tried to work through their divorce in the best way possible. Some kids out there have much worse experiences, with alcoholic, abusive parents who they have to tiptoe around. That\u2019s really what my song is about.\u201d<\/p>\n
To stop herself brooding around the house, and to help out financially, Menzel became a singer on the wedding and barmitzvah circuit. Then, in her early 20s, she auditioned for Rent, which became her Broadway debut.<\/p>\n
Does her mixture of confidence and self-doubt come from alternately supportive and critical parents? \u201cWell, my dad wasn\u2019t critical,\u201d she admits, \u201cbut he was quite fearful. He wanted me to major in something like business, to have a back-up in case I didn\u2019t succeed, because he knew how hard this industry was. My mom said: \u2018Forget that, do what you want and you\u2019ll be successful.\u2019 Now, of course, they\u2019re both ridiculous groupies of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Were they shocked by some of the content of Rent, with its tale of life on New York\u2019s Lower East Side under the shadow of Aids?
\n\u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re pretty liberal. They loved it. Come on \u2013 for Jewish parents, to have their daughter become successful in a Broadway show beats winning an Oscar. It even beats being a doctor!\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a third autobiographical song on her album \u2013 Gorgeous, about a gay couple she knows experiencing marriage difficulties. Menzel reveals that the track is partly about her own relationship with her husband, African-American actor Taye Diggs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m more comfortable revealing myself than hiding behind metaphors,\u201d she says. \u201cI respond to artists who reveal something of themselves. I don\u2019t have to talk about when I last had sex with my husband, although I probably would do that too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Be our guest. She smiles, but declines the offer. But she does reveal that she wrote the song after a bust-up with Diggs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt came out of an argument. We\u2019ve been together 12 years so I\u2019m not afraid to say: \u2018Look, in our industry, if the two of us are still together there will have been times that were amazing and others that were hard work.\u2019 People know marriage takes a lot of work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes pressures come more from outside than within \u2013 the couple were recently victims of racial abuse, receiving hate mail, much of it threatening, but that has, she says, died down now.
\n\u201cGorgeous is about my husband and I being an interracial couple and experiencing some\u2026\u201d \u2013 she hesitates before continuing \u2013 \u201cnegative feedback. It\u2019s about people having to make excuses to the world. I see it even more with my gay friends. I wanted to write a song about pursuing something you really believe in despite what others think.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the things she\u2019s pursuing right now is her platonic love affair with Barack Obama. She has even been campaigning on his behalf.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel really attached to this election,\u201d she says. \u201cI want the child I intend to have to be able to see a president who looks similar to him or her [ie mixed-race].\u201d
\nWill her kids be brought up Jewish?<\/p>\n
\u201cMy god, this is a tough interview,\u201d she laughs. \u201cI am a Jewish woman and I feel strong connections to my culture and, so yes, I would like to bring them up with knowledge of the stories and awareness of the history. I\u2019m just not sure about the rest. I\u2019m a spiritual person, not a religious person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stand is released by Warner Bros on October 13<\/p>\n
\nSnapshot<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n
Born:<\/strong> May 30, 1971. Long Island, New York. Mother, Helene, a psychotherapist; father, Stuart, a pyjama salesman.<\/p>\n
Career highlights:<\/strong> Broadway debut in 1996 in Rent. Won a Tony award in 2004 after starring in Wicked on Broadway. Played in Wicked in the West End in 2006. Released three albums.<\/p>\n
On being Jewish:<\/strong> \u201cI feel strong connections to my culture. I\u2019m a spiritual person, not a religious person.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Acting, singing, comedy \u2013 Idina Menzel can do it all, and that includes severe self-doubt. It has a lot to do with her parents. Idina Menzel is one of the biggest names in musical theatre, having appeared in Rent on Broadway and Wicked in the West End, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192,"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":[30,7,8,20,13],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-30","tag-career","tag-family-life","tag-i-stand","tag-taye-diggs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/2008_09_26.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-35","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","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=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/294"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}