Watch Idina Menzel
perform
She may be a singer with famously big lungs, but Idina Menzel has had to learn
how to speak up for herself and find her own voice.
After two false starts, the Tony award-winning Broadway star and fledgling
Hollywood actress has finally made a pop album that could fulfil her wish to
break into the charts. But Menzel still faces hurdles: mainstream radio and
the music business’s traditional suspicion of musical theatre, for one.
What, purists and programmers ask, could a singer best known for blasting
out show-stoppers in musicals such as Rent and Wicked on the Great White Way
possibly know about the ripped-from-the-chest authenticity of rock? Equally
hostile have been the keepers of the Broadway flame, among them the New York
theatre critic Ben Brantley, who described Menzel as a “vulpine vocal
powerhouse” and sniped at the teenaged fans her role as Elphaba in Wicked
(for which she won the Tony) attracted. “When I’m in them theatre, I’m ‘that
rock chick’,” the 37-year-old laughs, “and in rock music, I’m ‘the theatre
girl’. Talk about falling through the cracks.”
Certainly, Menzel’s voice is a mighty instrument, and an undeniably theatrical
one, too. But among the 10 tracks on her new album, I Stand, a song such as
Brave, with its huge emotional surges, empowering lyrics and ready emotion,
would, if sung by Christina Aguilera, probably scoot up the charts. Produced
by, and co-written with, Glen Ballard (who helped craft Alanis Morissette’s
Jagged Little Pill into the multiplatinum monster it became), the album
screams Radio 2, held-aloft cigarette lighters and the closing credits of a
Hollywood weepy. If it fails to catch fire, well, none of the people
involved in the project can be faulted for not giving it their best shot.
But then, as Menzel herself freely admits, she is a tough sell, beautiful
voice and photogenic looks aside. Her CV is all over the place. In Rent, she
was a lesbian performance artist (a role she reprised in Chris Columbus’s
2005 film of the musical). In Wicked, she played a green-skinned misfit who
overcame society’s ostracisation to triumph. Her first album, 1998’s Still I
Can’t Be Still, was regarded as a mess, its pop-soul sonic architecture
doing its best to drown out Menzel’s voice. Her second, Here (2004), was a
record of Broadway covers. Film roles have included small parts in Kissing
Jessica Stein, the New York lesbian-dating movie, and last year’s Disney
spoof, Enchanted. Decidedly mixed messages.
“I’m sort of an anomaly,” the singer says. “The versatility has been my gift
and my curse all my life. I miss that crossover type of hybrid performer,
like Bette Midler. But it’s not the easiest thing for people to write about
— or market. The minute someone says, ‘Woman from the musical theatre’,
well, she can’t possibly have the integrity of a rock or pop artist, can
she?
“I’ve worked with so many songwriters, and as soon as they heard I was ‘that
girl from that show’, they wanted to dumb me down. But I don’t think you
have to strip the emotion out of your voice in order for someone to listen
to you on the radio and want to sing along.”
The Broadway composer Michael John LaChiusa once argued that Menzel’s singing
is about much more than what he called her “high belt”. Brantley might
disagree, but, as I Stand compellingly demonstrates, the Long Islander can
do nuance as convincingly as she can do barnstorming.
In any case, the enduring myth that musical theatre is only about
show-must-go-on hoofing and crowd-manipulating big numbers speaks volumes
about the prejudices that persist about the genre. Again (of course), Menzel
falls between two stools. Her huge success in Wicked allowed people to
forget that she was part of the decidedly alternative Rent, and she has, in
a sense, been paying a price for Elphaba ever since.
“Rent was a critical triumph,” she says, “but Wicked, partly because it had
this huge budget and a lot of spectacle, was different. But every time Ben
Brantley wrote something about Idina and her American Idol-style fans, I
just had to breathe in and think: ‘Those are the kids who buy music, the
kids who will have their own kids and take them to shows, so I’ll still be
getting Broadway roles when I’m 50.’ ” Then, a little forlornly, she adds:
“I would love to be included in one of those Stephen Sondheim concerts at
the Kennedy Center, but I never get invited.”
As a child, Menzel dreamt of Broadway success, urging her mother to let her
audition for Annie, but Mrs Menzel was having none of it.
“She always reminded me,” the singer recalls, “about this little five-year-old
girl who got pulled off the summer-camp bus to go to an audition for a
commercial. She was crying, but her mom still made her go.” Menzel’s parents
divorced when she was 15, and, in order to bring some money into the home,
she got a job as a wedding singer, working the bar-mitzvah and marriage
circuit. It was here, she says, that she learnt her craft, odd though she
knows that sounds.
Until that point, she’d been receiving a classical training. From then on,
technique gave way to spontaneity: it was Whitney Houston, Madonna and
Aretha Franklin all the way. “Someone requests a song,” she says, “you
hardly know it, you’re on the spot, the lyrics are taped to the microphone,
and off you go. You’re winging it. But people aren’t really listening, so
you can sort of try your own thing.” In the tour she has just done across
America, Menzel included what she calls her “20-minute shtick” about the
period.
“I take everyone back to me as a wedding singer in 1989, so out come the
polyester shoulder pads and all that stuff. I go back to when I’m singing I
Just Called to Say I Love You and this man has a heart attack on the
dancefloor, so I try to stop singing and my boss yells, ‘The band always
plays on.’ Or the first dances: you’re singing Saving All My Love for You
for the newlyweds, and it’s a song about a guy cheating on his wife.”
While she was studying at NYU, Menzel sang in a succession of downtown rock
bands, but theatre — with its “in-built family”, which the self-confessedly
insular singer was drawn to — kept tempting her back. And Rent — which even,
and perhaps especially, those involved imagined might be a minor success, if
it took off at all — soon changed everything. It was during the run that
Menzel met her husband, the black American television actor Taye Diggs, who
was also in the cast. As their celebrity grew, their mixed-race relationship
led to their receiving a succession of threatening letters, and the police
became involved.
“We were in the cocoon of the theatre community — black, white, gay, straight
— so we didn’t feel any animosity,” she says. “The hate mail thing got blown
out of proportion, but it was a little scary, especially for other people.
We weren’t scared because we had these huge bodyguards, like we were Justin
and Britney: going out the back way, decoy cars. It was crazy.”
These days, the couple live in Los Angeles with a terrier named Sammy Davis Jr
and their two so-called “jazz cats”, Ella and Coltrane. Her husband, Menzel
says, “is very much glass half-full, he’s always believed that he was going
to do something important with his life, not in a conceited way, just that
his self-esteem is better”. Her self-confidence is, she says, more delicate.
“I’m learning that when someone says, ‘I thought you did a beautiful
interpretation of that song tonight,’ take it, and say thank you.”
Gorgeous, the best track on her new album, features the line “As long as we
crash and we collide”. That’s pretty violent for a love song, I suggest.
“Yes,” Menzel says, “but it’s romantic and tumultuous,
too. That’s the way I want to lead my life. I want things to be messy, to be
alive and risky.”
Risky is one word to describe her decision once again to dip her toes in the
chart-pop waters. A few years ago, an interviewer described Menzel as “both
shy and a show-off”. “Show-off is a little harsh,” the singer says. “I was
the kid who, in the car on the way to the beach in the summer, if a song
came on the radio, was the only one not singing. I didn’t want all my
friends to feel that I was trying to upstage them. You’re always so afraid
of standing out when you’re young.” And suddenly you understand what she
means about a gift and a curse.
I Stand and the single Brave are both released on Warner Bros on September
22
