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Audra McDonald is crouched over a curious white plastic box. “I swear this is a kayak,” she says as it suddenly unfolds like large-scale origami, making a satisfying crunch as it hits the pebbly shore. What will eventually be my vessel for the afternoon is now a flat piece of corrugated plastic.
We are perched on the banks of the Hudson River, just outside of Croton-on-Hudson, a storybook village about an hour’s train ride north of Manhattan. McDonald has lived here ever since she left the city in the wake of September 11. She had an infant daughter at the time and wanted some distance from the place she had called home ever since enrolling at Juilliard as an undergraduate in 1988.
The quiet of the riverbank is a stark contrast to the Broadway houses where McDonald has earned more acting Tony Awards than any other performer. After her first at 23 for Carousel, she went on to win for Master Class (1995), Ragtime (1998), A Raisin in the Sun (2004), The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (2012), and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill (2014). The accolades don’t quite convey the transformative experience of seeing her onstage—her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the throes of addiction in Lady Day has stayed with me for a decade. (Along the way, there have been long-running parts on The Good Fight and The Gilded Age.) Onstage, she has the Midas touch and also something of its curse, as expectations rise exponentially when her name is above the marquee. This fall, she will play the role of Rose in Gypsy, the indomitable stage mother to the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee. The character of Rose is something like the musical theater equivalent of Lady Macbeth, with a dash of Medea—despicable and irresistible in alternating measures, an almost inevitable role for the great actors of our time to eventually take on.
Today, however, McDonald is river-ready in black leggings, a gauzy black T-shirt, and well-worn Tevas, her hair tucked neatly into a denim cap, with not a hint of pretense about her. She enlists me in pulling the white contraption’s straps and adjusting pulleys, and it begins to take a more nautical shape. “Lordy, it is hot!” she says, laughing.
“This place is bigger than you, that’s what I like about it,” she says of the arcadian landscape. This is Washington Irving country (the town of Sleepy Hollow is 10 miles south), with its glittering streams, ancient trees, and sylvan meadows. Growing up amid the suburban sprawl of Fresno, California, McDonald was not so outdoorsy, preferring her local theater, where, incidentally, she played a child extra in Gypsy when she was 10. Both parents worked in education, her father, Stanley, as a principal then a superintendent and her mother, Anna, as a university administrator. Anna sang and played the piano in the home, but education was paramount. “That was your weapon and your armor,” McDonald says. “My parents were proud that I was able to have a career doing this. They would have been just as proud if I had been a teacher.”
Once everything is buckled and strapped, McDonald guides me into my craft. “You have to sit down right away or else.” I collapse on to the seat, nearly capsizing before we even embark. She calls out 5, 6, 7, 8 with a dance captain’s staccato rhythm and gently pushes me into the water. Then she hops on to her own vessel, and we are off.
On the cool, open water—with the effort and sweat of the shore behind us—I can’t help but murmur a lyric from Gypsy. “Wherever we go, whatever we do,” I sing, “we’re gonna go through it together.” She gamely finishes the line, paddling behind me: “We may not go far, but sure as a star, wherever we are, it’s together.” The song comes at a point when Rose is trying to convince her love interest, Herbie, and her daughter Louise that they must stick together. It’s a moment of cockeyed optimism that masks the lengths to which she is willing to go for fame. Among her calculated misdeeds: lying about her children’s ages, berating them in front of producers, treating her teenage daughters like toddlers, and living so vicariously as to make the pushiest of Dance Moms look modest.
Calling Rose a stage mother is a bit like calling a T. rex a reptile. The real life Rose Thompson Hovick was the ur-momager—a Kris Jenner or Tina Knowles well before their time—who devoted herself, often to the point of delusion, to making her two daughters, June and Louise (eventually, Gypsy), into stars on the waning vaudeville circuit of the 1920s. Rose’s exploits were laid bare in Gypsy Rose Lee’s rollicking 1957 autobiography, Gypsy: A Memoir, which became the source material for the musical as well as a 1962 movie starring Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood. Gypsy, née Louise, began stripping in burlesque houses as a teenager under Mother’s watchful and approving eye and became a cause célèbre in the ’40s and ’50s as the “intellectual stripper,” consorting with the likes of W.H. Auden and William Saroyan. Lee refers to Dear Old Mom in the book variously as “a jungle mother” for her eat-or-be-eaten instincts; she was “courageous, resourceful and ambitious, but not nice.” She had her own spin on the golden rule, Lee writes: “Do unto others before they do you.”
Shortly after the book’s publication, Lee, at 46 and at the end of her burlesque career, sold the rights to Broadway producer David Merrick. Merrick, along with fellow producer Leland Hayward, brought together Arthur Laurents for the script, Jule Styne for the music, and a 28-year-old Stephen Sondheim for lyrics. Jerome Robbins, fresh off West Side Story, would eventually direct and choreograph. Laurents cleverly made the full title Gypsy: A Musical Fable to allow for some factual wiggle room. The team put it all together in an astonishing four months, opening on Broadway with Ethel Merman in May 1959.
After about an hour on the water, McDonald senses I am flagging and graciously suggests we head back to terra firma for a coffee. “But you have to at least stick your feet in the water first,” she instructs. “It feels great!” Her astrological sign is Cancer. “Water is very important to us.”
As she paddles back to shore, I notice a blue stone on her finger that catches the light with each stroke. The ring was given to her by fellow Broadway actor Will Swenson when he proposed. (It once belonged to his mother.) The two actors first became acquainted while performing in the musical 110 in the Shade on Broadway in 2007. (Swenson was an understudy who often ended up onstage.) Both had children of similar ages and got together for playdates before any romance began. “We were in struggling and soon-to-be-done marriages, and the kids got along great,” says Swenson. “We had good chemistry.”
Swenson’s mother had recently passed away from cancer, just a few months before McDonald’s father was killed in a plane crash, and the two found a kind of solace in their mourning. “Understanding the fragility of life, I didn’t want to look back and think that I didn’t go for something,” McDonald says, speaking about her career, but perhaps about affairs of the heart as well. The two married in autumn of 2012 at their home in Croton-on-Hudson. “This place in the fall—forget about it!” she swoons, gesturing to the blanket of trees, today in the lush green of high summer. Growing up in seasonless Fresno, she would fantasize about the leaves and pumpkins of the Charlie Brown Halloween special she watched on television.
Swenson brought two sons to the union from a previous marriage, Bridger (23) and Sawyer (20), who, in addition to McDonald’s oldest daughter, Zoe (23), and a daughter the couple had together, Sally (7), formed a big, blended family. “It felt very Brady Bunchy,” says Swenson, who recently starred in the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise. With the older children all out of the house now, Swenson and McDonald take a tag-you’re-it approach to their youngest, balancing their Broadway and television schedules with being parents. McDonald’s mother also moved in next door a few years ago: “It takes a village, but we have a good village.”
At the Black Cow coffee shop in downtown Croton, McDonald sips an iced matcha latte and considers the Roses who have come before her, a litany of Broadway’s one-name grandes dames: Ethel, Angela, Tyne, Bernadette, Patti. “How are you going to possibly stand up to what’s been out there before?” McDonald asks. “I’m at peace with it. None of them did it like any of the rest of them did it. So you can add another one to the pile!” Working with director George C. Wolfe, the six-time Tony winner who directed McDonald onstage in Shuffle Along in 2016 and in the film Rustin last year, has helped. “Audra is a living manifestation of talent and drive and ambition, and she exploded the box,” Wolfe tells me. “This woman is determined to get at the truth of every character.” Joy Woods, the actress who will be playing Louise, grew up watching videos of McDonald on YouTube and describes the prospect of starring opposite her now as surreal: “She becomes a conduit for whatever the story is. Her sense of surrender as a person…you have to have a good heart for that.”
This Rose is not just being played by a Black actress, but will be a Black character, with Black children. And, as Wolfe puts it, “race is embodied, not articulated.” Rose’s predicament—a single mother refusing to live by the rules—is universal, regardless of race, and a reason to do the show, in 2024 or ever. He quotes from the show: “‘When is it my turn?’ Rose asks. Audra is a woman and she’s Black and she is going to bring all that means.”
Though this Gypsy will have an added layer of resonance that comes from the identity of its lead, McDonald tells me they do not intend to change the script to fit their vision—a testament to the timelessness of Sondheim’s lyrics. Before he died in 2021, he gave her his personal blessing to play Rose. “I always felt very supported by him,” she says. “He was a teacher to me. He was always cheering me on in a private and personal way.” Sondheim, a famous letter writer, wrote to her fairly often. “I have all of them and keep them close to my heart,” she says.
At 54, McDonald talks about the peace that comes with age, and that is palpable to her since her last Broadway musical, Shuffle Along, eight years ago. “I am calmer now, I am more in my body. I know who I am.” She smiles thinking about the surprise that came during the run of her last musical: her youngest daughter. “We thought it was menopause that time, but it turned out to be Sally.” Of the many differences between her and Rose, she finds one undeniable connection: “I am a mama bear. I am overprotective. I don’t think Rose saw herself as separate from her girls. I understand that instinct.”
At this point in late summer, there are still a few weeks before rehearsals, before the storm of Rose rolls in. Swenson notices that his wife has been nesting: installing new doors, framing pictures. Since the pandemic, gardening has become an obsession; she’s planted hydrangeas, lilacs, creeping thyme, a pumpkin patch for Sally. Her approach is instinctive: “I don’t know what I’m doing!”
One thing she is approaching with purpose: the upcoming election. “I almost don’t want to hope against hope at what could be,” she says, referring to Kamala Harris’s campaign. McDonald will spend the remaining weeks of summer organizing Broadway for Harris events and drives to get out the Black vote. “We better buckle up and buckle down,” she says.
McDonald’s daughter will be home from day camp soon. I ask how McDonald feels about Rose looming in the not-so-far-off distance. “I am terrified. The prospect of failure, of not finding her. Of diving all the way to the bottom of the pool and not finding it,” she says, her eyes widening. “But I will put everything I have into it.” Ready or not, here comes Mama.
In this story: hair, Lacy Redway; makeup, Michaela Bosch; manicurist, Gina Edwards; tailor, Germania Fernandez; produced by AP Studio Inc; set design, Mary Howard; props, Hook Props; location, Hook Studios.