Idina Menzel is far from a typical pop singer. Her background is on Broadway as the star of musicals such as \u201cRent\u201d and \u201cWicked.\u201d Mainstream fans got to know her face from a stint on the hit TV series \u201cGlee.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while she\u2019s released a handful of pop-oriented albums in recent years, for her biggest hit single she was animated \u2013 literally the hand-drawn and computer-generated Disney princess Elsa \u2013 singing \u201cLet It Go\u201d and other numbers from Disney\u2019s \u201cFrozen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even John Travolta eventually learned her name, though it took him two trips to the Academy Awards to figure it out.<\/p>\n
So when Menzel plays the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday fans will get a little bit of all of the above, which the 44-year-old singer says by phone after a concert recently is something with which this year\u2019s world tour helped her get comfortable.<\/p>\n
\u201cI gave myself license to do whatever I felt like,\u201d Menzel says from the back of her tour bus in Ohio. \u201cBecause the success of \u2018Let It Go\u2019 did not abide by any rules.<\/p>\n
\u201cA song in an animated movie and it gets played on pop stations? A huge pop hit? Once that happened in my life I went, \u2018You know what? I\u2019m going to stop trying to figure out the trends of what I\u2019m supposed to be doing, stop chasing things and just do what I like.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have a great arranger and great arrangements it sort of ties everything together. Radiohead you can do. Cole Porter, you can do that, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
The world tour this year is her biggest outing after the success of \u201cLet It Go\u201d and \u201cFrozen,\u201d and has taken her from Japan and South Korea to the United Kingdom and all across the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been, I have to say, life-changing,\u201d Menzel says. \u201cI\u2019ve been on tour a lot in my life, but this feels like everything is clicking. The crowd, the venues that I\u2019m playing, they\u2019re bigger, but we\u2019re still able to maintain an intimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Audiences are different now, too, she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s little girls and boys with their parents,\u201d Menzel says. \u201cMaybe their parents used to be \u2018Rent\u2019-heads who are now older and have had kids. There\u2019s the theater community, the people who\u2019ve got to see \u2018Rent\u2019 and \u2018Wicked\u2019 and my last show [\u201cIf\/Then\u201d]. There\u2019s a huge gay community. It\u2019s everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
Initially, she says she wasn\u2019t sure how those disparate crowds would blend.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was concerned a little bit about that and being true to myself and not offending everybody,\u201d Menzel says. \u201cBut you know what? I\u2019m 44 years old. I can\u2019t get up on stage and just play to the 12-year-olds.\u201d<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s worked, she says, reminding her in a way of how singer Bette Midler always incorporates different aspects of her musical personality into a single show.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s been so liberating,\u201d Menzel says. \u201cThe acceptance. It feels like everyone accepts all of these parts of me that I have been nurturing for a long, long time and wasn\u2019t sure how to tie them all up in the same package. I stressed about that for a long time, and I don\u2019t care anymore. Not with a blas\u00e9 attitude.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor lack of a better term, you have to let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her concert at the Hollywood Bowl is her debut there in more ways than just performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything there,\u201d Menzel says. \u201cI was supposed to go so many times with a bunch of friends but it never worked out. So it will just be a virginal experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her debut on the Academy Awards in 2014 was fine as far as her performance of \u201cLet It Go,\u201d which moments later won the Oscar for best song. Her introduction by Travolta? Not so much, as the actor opened his mouth to say Idina Manzel and came out with something along the lines of Adele Dazeem, which in the age of social media turned instantly into a bit of viral infamy.<\/p>\n
A year later, at the most recent Oscar show, Travolta and Menzel appeared on stage together and all was made right, though Menzel says it was never a bad thing for her public profile.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it was the best mistake that could have happened to me,\u201d she says. \u201cIt broadened my profile but even more than that it made me feel great, because all of the fans who had been with me from early days, in more of my niche career, were so angry about the whole situation for me that they showed their love.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt really loved by everyone erupting in this kind of response: \u2018How could they mispronounce her name, don\u2019t they know who she is?\u2019 After you think, \u2018Oh my God, he messed up my name, then all these good things happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked if she\u2019s hoping to see Travolta at the Hollywood Bowl, maybe leave tickets for him at will-call, Menzel laughs and says maybe she will.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have his email, we talk from time to time,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ll email him \u2013 he should come!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Idina Menzel is far from a typical pop singer. Her background is on Broadway as the star of musicals such as \u201cRent\u201d and \u201cWicked.\u201d Mainstream fans got to know her face from a stint on the hit TV series \u201cGlee.\u201d And while she\u2019s released a handful of pop-oriented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[36,11],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","tag-36","tag-world-tour-2015"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-94","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}