When five-time Tony Award-winning singer and actress Audra McDonald decided it was about time she step back into the recording studio—it had been seven years since she’d released her last solo effort, Build a Bridge—the concept for her fifth Nonesuch disc came together quickly, starting with the title, Go Back Home. As she recounts, “If there were a Broadway show written about my life, especially the last seven years, this would be the soundtrack. That’s the main theme of the album, coming back home to my physical roots, to my theatrical roots, coming back home to singing—coming back home to me, in a way.”

In the intervening years, McDonald, already a familiar face on network television, enjoyed a long-running role on the hit ABC medical-drama series Private Practice. But she increasingly longed to return full-time to New York City, where merely a year after graduating from Juilliard she established her name as a rising musical theater star, earning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical for the 1994 Lincoln Center production of Carousel. That was just the first in a series of award-winning performances: Before McDonald reached 30, she garnered two additional Tonys in the same category, for Terrence McNally’s play Master Class (1996) and for his musical Ragtime (1998). In 2004, she won a fourth, for A Raisin in the Sun.

McDonald’s first move when she decided to come back east was to take on the demanding lead role in director Diane Paulus and playwright Suzan Lori-Parks’ adaptation of George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy and Bess, a stunning performance that proved to be as arduous as it was acclaimed. That earned McDonald her record-tying fifth Tony Award, her first as Leading Actress. Recounts McDonald, “Coming back from Los Angeles and immediately going into Porgy and Bess—something so difficult, such a major role to tackle—it felt wonderful in the way that if you haven’t been exercising in a while and then you start and you are in a lot of pain, but it’s good pain. It felt great to come back and stretch my muscles again and feel more like myself again in a theater. I had a wonderful time on Private Practice, but coming back home to the theater and to singing again made me feel that I was whole.”

Mark-Eugene Garcia is a proud member of A.S.C.A.P.  He studied book and lyric writing with the Academy of New Musical Theatre in Los Angeles. His musicals include STANDBY (New York International Fringe Festival- Encores Selection, New York Musical Theatre Festival, Next Link Selection), THE HOLY COWS OF CREDENCE SOUTH DAKOTA (PCTF- Outstanding Book of a new Musical and/or Play with Music- Nominee), FACING EAST: A NEW MUSICAL (Broadwayworld.com Chicago Special Event- Nominee), and THE JOURNEY. His plays include (UN)MISSED CONNECTIONS (Jacob Weiser Playwriting Award for a Fully Realized Drama, The Stark Award in Drama in Memory of Ross Alexander- honorable mention), ONE NIGHT AT THE GOLDEN BOOT, INSCRIPTIONS, WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR and KEYS. His works have been presented in The New York International Fringe Festival, The Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, The Puzzle: Marble’s Festival of New Works, ANMT’s Festival of New Musicals, Untucked: LBGT One Act festival, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Disney’s Hyperion Theatre, and The Colony Theatre Burbank. He has contributed additional lyrics to Recording Artist Barry Brandon’s touring show In My Own Words. 


City of Strangers, the debut album by A Sondheim Jazz Project, (purchase: www.sondheimjazzproject.com) takes on no less a task than rebuilding the lost bond between Broadway and modern jazz. Its leader, Bobby Hsu, has set the  beautiful melodies of Broadway’s great master—Stephen Sondheim—to the compositional language of Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard and others while maintaining a deep respect for the dramatic and emotional heart of Sondheim’s stunning lyrics.
In Alex Samaras, ASJP has a singer who strikes a balance between perfectly placed jazz phrasing, tasteful improvisation, and something often neglected in jazz: a dynamic performance of the lyrics as story and character. 
Available on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/city-of-strangers/id658069524

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