Six-time
Tony Award winner and two-time Grammy Award-winner Audra McDonald will serve as
a guest artist in Stevens Point this April through the Sentry Insurance
Invitation to the Arts series.
McDonald will perform
favorite show tunes, popular standards and original pieces at 7:30 p.m. on
Wednesday, April 8, at Sentry Insurance’s Theater@1800. All proceeds will be donated to local arts programming. The show is sold out.
McDonald
will also work with UW-Stevens Point musical theatre students and Stevens Point
area sixth-grade students on Thursday, April 9.
The
Emmy-nominated host of “Live From Lincoln Center,” McDonald is equally at home
on the Broadway and opera stages as she is in film and television roles. She
won Tony Awards for roles in “Carousel,” “Master Class,” “A Raisin in the Sun,”
“Porgy and Bess,” “Ragtime” and most recently as Billie Holiday in “Lady Day at
Emerson’s Bar and Grill.” She played Dr. Naomi Bennett in “Grey’s Anatomy” and
“Private Practice” and has acted in numerous movies.
McDonald
won her Grammy Awards for recordings of Kurt Weill’s opera “Rise and Fall of
the City of Mahagonny.” On
the concert stage, she has sung with nearly every major American orchestra,
including the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic,
as well as in Berlin, Paris and London.
The Sentry Insurance Invitation to the Arts is
sponsored by Sentry Insurance Foundation in conjunction with the College of
Fine Arts & Communication at UW-Stevens Point. The program provides local
students, from grade school to college, opportunities to interact with
outstanding professionals in the fine arts, including Yo Yo Ma, Mandy Patinkin,
Patti LuPone and Wynton Marsalis.