One day, they may have to name an award the Audra, after Audra McDonald, the luminous stage and screen star who joins conductor Osmo Vänskä in concert this weekend to kick off the Minnesota Orchestra's new season.
With her finely honed craft and passion, McDonald is one of the most celebrated performers in Broadway history. Last year, she won her sixth Tony Award — more than any other actor — for playing Billie Holiday in "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill."
In a moving acceptance speech, McDonald blurted out thanks to her mom and her "dad up in heaven for disobeying the doctors and not medicating their hyperactive girl."
She was not speaking out against the pharmaceutical industry.
"I was not making some universal statement — I was speaking solely to my experience," she said ahead of her Minnesota engagement. "I'm not making a statement about medicating kids. For some kids, it's the right thing. For others, it's something else."
For her, that something else was the stage. A self-described "little girl with a pot belly and Afro-puffs who was hyperactive and overdramatic," McDonald was born in Germany — her father was a soldier stationed in Berlin — but she and her younger sister grew up in Fresno, Calif., where her dad became a school principal and her mother a university administrator.
She was always getting into stuff, she recalled, and once nearly set the house on fire.
"I was a handful," she said.
