Bridge to Nowhere

It’s called Build a Bridge for a reason.

Audra McDonald, a four-time Tony winner with an achingly gorgeous voice, strives to link her rich Julliard-trained pipes and her beloved Great White Way with some of America’s best pop songwriters. She bravely mines tracks from Elvis Costello, Rufus Wainwright, Laura Nyro, Neil Young, and Randy Newman and bolsters them with a couple of pieces by musical composer Adam Guettel.

Here is “Being Green,” Kermit the Frog’s famous tune, next to Rufus Wainwright’s ode to opera characters (“Damned Ladies”) and Adam Guettel’s lovely little aria to a couple drifting apart (“Dividing Day.”)

Some theatre-obsessed people – namely me – have been waiting for years for a great singer and actress like McDonald to build this bridge. We wanted an album we could use to impress drama-shy friends and family.

“See this is why you should be listening! You don’t need to get all of your angst from people on reality TV!” we’d say waving the CD jewel case. ”You can actually get some well-executed Sturm und Drang from some actual talent instead of unskilled Midwesterners seeking attention by eating bugs on some island or doing vocal calisthenics at the top of their lungs through overdone pop songs!” (“Vocal calisthenics” is my term for what most R&B singers and American Idols do today.)

McDonald is utilizing the album to capture this year’s concerts at the Lincoln Center (she had a stint earlier, she has another in October.) It’s part of the American Songwriter series, where a venerated artist gets the honor of putting together her own program of great American songs she loves.

In concept and design this album is stunning, and she would seem to be starting on the right foot. And if anyone could fuse these disparate influences into a seamless work of pop art, McDonald could. But it all fails in its execution. Shockingly, both the musical arrangements and her honey-tipped voice are marred with bland, unemotional sameness.

The almost entirely superdull scoring – mostly by brothers Doug and Dan Petty – wouldn’t necessarily have been the architectural error that brought this Bridge down. McDonald’s aural talents could have propped this project up to glorious redemption. But, tragically, the singer and her producers seem to want to rein her in, like she’s just a breathy chanteuse a la Norah Jones instead of one of the most exciting voices currently on Broadway. Gone is the fire she brought to stage works like Ragtime and earlier recorded tracks like “Come down from That Tree,” gone is the cleverness she brought to Carousel and her small roles in TV’s Annie and Wit. There is no reason to truncate such dramatic talent; the exclusion is disturbingly tedious.

How did four tracks in the center of this album blend into one single tedious malaise? Could this be the same woman won four Tony Awards, two for acting? (And an Emmy nomination, by the way.) Is the same diva whose lovely sophomore album ripped through so many of Broadway’s great composers with edgy aplomb? Perhaps, those unanswered questions are the only drama this project has!

There is one track here that matches her brilliant second album How Glory Goes. Randy Newman’s pensive classic “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” closes the album with aching tenderness. However, on the other twelve tracks, Audra McDonald’s once-stunning emotion, wit, charm, inflection, intonation and drive seems completely removed in favor of a lovely but vapid vocal sameness. It’s a painful omission that leaves this brilliant woman’s Bridge – a structure that could have been breathtaking – forever unfinished.

Oh well, uneducated family, back to your reality TV.