CARNEGIE HALL Singer cements musical-theater status

The performance's centerpiece is a new song cycle.
NEW YORK (AP) -- With her concert at Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall's newest performance space, Audra McDonald has reconfirmed her status as one of the leading ladies of the American musical theater -- and as an ardent supporter of new American song.
Her 75-minute celebration, which premiered last week, and will be repeated today and Thursday, included works by such greats as Harold Arlen and Dorothy Fields. But its centerpiece was a new song cycle called "The Seven Deadly Sins," featuring present-day composers and lyricists examining anger, gluttony, vanity, lust, sloth, envy and greed.
McDonald, looking buffed and toned in basic black, jokingly called the evening "an out-of-town tryout in town." The singer, moonlighting from her usual job as Ruth Younger in the Broadway revival of "A Raisin in the Sun," is the epitome of self-confidence. Sunday, she won a Tony for Best Featured for her role in the play.
Assisted by her longtime musical director, Ted Sperling, and a five-man combo, McDonald first sang her way through an eclectic collection of numbers, which she described as "sorbet, some foreplay before the sins."
Included
These works included the expansive title tune from "The Light in the Piazza," the much-anticipated new Adam Guettel-Craig Lucas musical that McDonald said would be done at Lincoln Center in 2005.
The song perfectly fit the singer, a longtime Guettel supporter. It features a long, expansive melody, complemented by achingly romantic lyrics. McDonald doesn't just sing songs, she acts them, turning each number into a melodic mini-play.
Her talent for the theatrical -- from humor to high drama -- served her well for the new pieces, written by some of the best composers around.
Among the highlights:
Acerbic piety dominates "The Christian Thing to Do," Michael John LaChiusa's country take on what can best be described as an unsuccessful yet hilarious attempt at anger management.
Gluttony was the centerpiece of "I Eat," a mournful, affecting piece by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty in which eating becomes the sole, sad reason for existence.
And McDonald was able to demonstrate her gift for supreme silliness in "Blah, Blah, Me," Jake Heggie's dissection of vanity.
Yet the evening's best moment came at the end, after those sins had been put to bed. McDonald delivered "Ain't It de Truth," the Arlen-E.Y. Harburg classic from the Broadway musical "Jamaica."
The delightful, jaunty number is an exhortation to live life to fullest -- right now. And McDonald amply demonstrated that joy.