Audra McDonald was the queen of Broadway even before she picked up her history-making sixth Tony Award for best actress in a play for “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” on Sunday night. When she won, not only racking up No. 6 but completing her domination across all acting categories — leading and featured, play and musical — the crowd stood and roared.
Then she spoke, and became something more. McDonald reached back, starting with supportive and strong-minded parents now “up in heaven,” for “disobeying the doctor’s orders and not medicating their hyperactive girl and finding out what she was into instead.”
McDonald honored trailblazers when she paid tribute to a tradition of African American women, thanking “all the shoulders of the strong and brave and courageous women that I’m standing on” – Lena Horne, Maya Angelou, Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, all achievers through obstacles. She had special words for Billie Holiday, the talented Lady Day she channeled onstage, the performer who died at the age of 44, just a year older than the actress and singer holding her latest award. “You deserved so much more than you were given when you were on this planet,” McDonald said to the spirit of Holiday. “This is for you.”
I wasn’t at all surprised that she won as I watched the Tony Awards Sunday, because the night before I was in the audience as McDonald turned Broadway’s Circle in the Square theater into the intimate bar that now stands abandoned on a corner in Philadelphia.
