News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert\/cabaret stage.<\/p>\n
There has never been any doubt about Idina Menzel\u2019s vocal prowess. From the moment she stepped on to the Broadway stage as Maureen in the late Jonathan Larson\u2019s Rent, it was clear that the young performer possessed a thrilling belt. She subsequently demonstrated her powerful tones in the Manhattan Theatre Club\u2019s production of The Wild Party, the City Center Encores! mounting of Hair and the all star Funny Girl benefit concert for the Actors\u2019 Fund of America. However, with her starring role in Stephen Schwartz\u2019s Wicked, Menzel has taken a great leap forward as an actress. She is currently offering her most nuanced performance to date, making us care greatly for the fate of her character, Elphaba, the not-so-Wicked Witch of the West. Menzel is funny, often touching and delivers a passionately sympathetic performance of a woman whose outward differences force her to confront the ignorance of those around her. I recently had the chance to chat with the soft-spoken Menzel, who will soon welcome husband Taye Diggs \u2014 another former Renter \u2014 to the cast of Wicked for a limited engagement. That brief conversation follows.<\/p>\n
Question: How does it feel being back on Broadway?<\/strong> Q: So, did you trip Norbert [Leo Butz] to get your husband into the show. [Laughs.]<\/strong> Q: Are you excited about your husband joining the show?<\/strong> Q: How long does it take you to apply the green make-up, and how long does it take to get it off after the show?<\/strong> Q: What is the make-up? Did the designers have to experiment with different types?<\/strong> Q: Do you keep the color on between shows on matinee days?<\/strong> Q: Was this the first time you\u2019ve gone out of town with a show? What was that experience like?<\/strong> Q: What was it like working with Joe Mantello as a director?<\/strong> Q: Do you have a favorite song or moment in the show?<\/strong> Q: What do you think the message of Wicked is?<\/strong> Q: Was theatre always your plan or were you originally more interested in a pop career?<\/strong> Q: And you have a new album coming out?<\/strong> Q: A lot of your former Rent co-stars are back on stage this season. Do you still spend time with them?<\/strong> Q: Are you involved in any other theatre projects or workshops?<\/strong> By Andrew Gans<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert\/cabaret stage. There has never been any doubt about Idina Menzel\u2019s vocal prowess. From the moment she stepped on to the Broadway stage as Maureen in the late Jonathan Larson\u2019s Rent, it was clear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_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","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[37,3,4,5],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-37","tag-here","tag-rent","tag-wicked"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/2013_12_19_divatalk.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","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=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIdina Menzel: It feels great. [Laughs.] It\u2019s a great role, and I\u2019m proud to be in it.<\/p>\n
\nIM: No! [Laughs.] I love Norbert. Norbert and I are the best of friends and really enjoy working together.<\/p>\n
\nIM: I\u2019m so excited about him joining, yeah. It\u2019ll be just great for the holidays, and we can spend time together, and I think he\u2019s perfect for the role. But I miss Norbert tremendously.<\/p>\n
\nIM: Putting it on \u2014 it\u2019s about 40 minutes. Getting it off is like ten minutes in the shower, scrubbing it off. If there\u2019s somebody I want to meet after the show, then I sit there and scrub my skin to death, get out of the shower and meet them looking presentable. [Laughs.]<\/p>\n
\nIM: No, actually, MAC makes all these colors. They had a make-up that was green [and] you just add water. It\u2019s like a water color. We use a Japanese brush, and it smoothes it on.<\/p>\n
\nIM: No \u2014 I take a ton of showers because I like the steam for my voice. There\u2019s a lot of smoke in the show, so I\u2019m always steaming, which is probably good for the make-up because then my pores are cleaned all the time. But, no I can\u2019t eat [with the make-up on] \u2014 it\u2019s gross! [Also, the color] gets deeper as the show goes on, so to have it look the way it does at the beginning, I have to start over.<\/p>\n
\nIM: Yeah. It was incredible and very important. I think that if you\u2019re doing a new musical, you want to have the opportunity to experiment and try things without the whole city of critics looking over your shoulder. And, the writers had that freedom to play, and they did. We tried different things, and we moved the order of scenes, and [they] wrote new lines and tried different costumes. It\u2019s a very important part of the process for a new musical.<\/p>\n
\nIM: I really owe it all to him. He challenged me to be better and really helped me discover who this woman was. When they are writing a new piece, they\u2019re not sure where they\u2019re coming from sometimes. The climate of who she is changes depending on a scene that\u2019s in or not, so you\u2019re constantly going, \u2018Okay, wait. Now, I\u2019m actually funny sometimes!\u2019 He just helped me figure out every moment and be specific and helped me bring out the essence of who she is.<\/p>\n
\nIM: I have several favorite moments; it depends on the day. I love singing the duet with Kristin at the end because I\u2019m always in awe of how different our voices are, and yet, when we sing together in unison, how wonderfully they blend. That\u2019s an important statement for the characters and the people that we are in real life as well. I love singing the duet with Norbert because I get to be the ingenue. All the other roles I\u2019ve had, I\u2019m always the slutty supporting character [laughs], and now I get to sing the pretty love song, so I love doing that. I love flying and singing \u2018Defying Gravity,\u2019 which is my most favorite song in the show.<\/p>\n
\nIM: There are a lot of messages. The two main ones \u2014 the story of the friendship of these two women and how they, through striving for truth in themselves, they really give a wonderful gift to each other and change each other forever. I think that that\u2019s important. I think that the idea that when someone\u2019s different from us, we tend to be threatened by them, and that we have to strive to look deeper than the surface. I think that\u2019s the other most important message.<\/p>\n
\nIM: It vacillated. Growing up I studied classically and did lots of shows in school. And then I went to NYU for theatre, but I also did a lot of [singing at] weddings and bar mitzvahs. I was the front singer in a band in Long Island, and I had to learn so many different kinds of music for that, so I started listening to people other than theatre and classical, more like R&B and blues. That inspired me to want to write my own music and find my own style. I tried to find the balance of recording my own music and, also, always coming back to the theatre because I always find that I\u2019ve been embraced here in a really wonderful way, and I love the communal aspect of it. I love working with a cast and a group of people every day, which is different than recording because you\u2019re usually pretty isolated and alone. They serve as a good balance for each other.<\/p>\n
\nIM: I do. It\u2019s what they call an EP, which means it\u2019s only six songs. I did it this summer in between [Wicked\u2018s San Francisco run and Broadway]. I recorded some songs that people have always asked me to record from the shows I\u2019ve done, my own shows. And then there are a couple new songs. It\u2019s all original material. . . It\u2019s going to be called \u201cHere.\u201d It\u2019s really unplugged and very organic. It should be out by the holidays or the first of the year.<\/p>\n
\nIM: We do. Daphne [Rubin-Vega] is one of my closest friends. She came to my wedding, and I\u2019m very happy for her because I hear that she\u2019s wonderful [in Anna in the Tropics]. I\u2019m actually just trying to figure out what schedule changes we have so I can figure out what day I have free to go see her.<\/p>\n
\nIM: Oh, I can\u2019t handle anything else but this right now! [Laughs.] I pretty much have no life outside of the theatre. I go home every night and I put the TV on and I veg out and order food. And, then I e-mail people, which has been good because I\u2019ve gotten better with the computer! And then on Mondays I don\u2019t talk. It\u2019s kind of rough just keeping up on my relationships with friends outside of the show. But it\u2019s what you\u2019ve gotta do, at least for a little longer until it\u2019s in your body.<\/p>\n