Word: audra
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...latest composition is a song cycle about love, sin, doubt and transcendence. The music is composed in an utterly personal style that blends pop, gospel and classical influences; the lyrics weave together Greek mythology and Christian hymnody to complex, unsettling effect. Persuasively performed on CD by singers such as Audra McDonald, Mandy Patinkin and Guettel, Myths & Hymns is a major event in American popular song...
Some of the sketches reminded the faithful why they were there: to fight the loss and loneliness that attend AIDS and other human calamities. A woman (Elizabeth Franz) whose son had died in a car accident was comforted by the beautiful singing of the woman (Audra McDonald) whose car had hit him. Two G.I.'s (Brian Dennehy and George Wendt) play a game of Botticelli while waiting for, and then gunning down, a lone enemy soldier. At the funeral for a young man dead of AIDS, his lover (Tim Robbins) tries to reach out to the dead man's mother...
Where did the sassy, savvy show tunes of yesteryear go? Has the all-American genre been smothered in middlebrow blandness by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his carpetbag clones? Way Back to Paradise (Nonesuch/Atlantic), the first solo album from three-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, points to smarter times ahead for the Great White Way. It contains 14 songs by five young composers who specialize in musical theater, none of which sound even remotely like Memory. All are highly listenable; a few, downright remarkable...
...will the saloon singers of the next century still be crooning George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer? Or is a new generation of as-yet-unknown popular songwriters quietly turning out tomorrow's standards today? Perhaps Audra McDonald will answer that question on her next album...
...DIED. AUDRA LINDLEY, 79, veteran actress best known as sex-starved, muumuu-clad landlady Helen Roper on the sitcom Three's Company; of complications from leukemia; in Los Angeles. A daughter of actors, Lindley played Broadway, big-screen and television roles, most recently as Cybill Shepherd's mother on Cybill...