Interview by Daniel Robert Epstein, contributing editor Idina Menzel was in the original cast of Rent and Wicked on Broadway. She is making the transition to Hollywood with the big-budget version of Rent (now available on DVD) and Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust. In Towne’s film, Idina plays […]
Idina Menzel will reprise her Tony-winning performance as the green-faced Elphaba in the upcoming West End production of Stephen Schwartz’s hit musical Wicked. The musical, which is currently playing Broadway, Chicago and a national tour, will officially open at London’s Victoria Apollo — currently host to Billy Joel’s […]
Idina Menzel Provides a Few Details on “Enchanted:” “Amy Adams is playing this princess in a real fairy tale world. It starts out with eight minutes of animation, like a spoof on Disney, and she plays this princess, and James Marsden is the prince. They fall in love […]
There’s a late-’80s episode of The Golden Girls where Blanche and Rose befriend two teenagers as part of the “Be a Pal” program. The young ladies want to go to a movie and Rose, bubbly as always, suggests a few options: “We can go see Oliver & Company. […]
My main thought while sitting in a movie theater waiting for the film, Rent, to begin, was that I was happy that Hollywood is once again producing movies based on hit musical plays. Thanks to the success of the movie version of Chicago the energy of creation is […]
IDINA MENZEL Ever since she burst forth on the stage of the Nederlander Theatre in the original cast of Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent, Idina Menzel has been a force to be reckoned with in the musical theatre. The New York native possesses one of the most unique […]
It’s weird to be looked up to by little girls,” says Idina Menzel. We’re sitting at a cafeteria table in the cavernous brass-and-chrome lobby of the Public Theater. It’s the week before previews for her latest musical vehicle, Michael John LaChuisa’s See What I Wanna See, and Menzel […]
Tony Award winner Idina Menzel, whose final weekend in the hit musical Wicked was marred by an onstage injury that left her with a broken rib, has posted a letter on her official website. Menzel writes, “So here I am, on my couch, propped up by 12 pillows, […]
She wasn’t in costume, she wasn’t in makeup, and she wasn’t even in character. But when Idina Menzel took the stage in a tracksuit yesterday afternoon at the Gershwin Theater, the standing ovation — some 1,800 strong and five minutes long — was like few you’ve ever seen: […]
Tony Award winner Idina Menzel, who was to play her final performance in Wicked Jan. 9, was injured during the Jan. 8 matinee of the hit Stephen Schwartz musical. Shoshana Bean, Menzel’s standby who was slated to officially take over the role of Elphaba beginning Jan. 11, played […]
EIGHT times a week, Idina Menzel, who plays the witch Elphaba in the Broadway musical ”Wicked” at the Gershwin Theater, covers her face, hands and neck with green makeup, then puts on a matching bodysuit so that she is the color of a snow pea from head to […]
Defying the Oz It’s ironic that Idina Menzel’s first line of dialogue in a Broadway show was “Which way to the stage?” More than eight years after her debut in Rent, this born performer shows no signs of needing directions. Menzel, a Long Island native who grew up dreaming […]
News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert/cabaret stage. There has never been any doubt about Idina Menzel’s vocal prowess. From the moment she stepped on to the Broadway stage as Maureen in the late Jonathan Larson’s Rent, it was clear […]
”IT’S good to see me, isn’t it?” Thus does Glinda the Good Witch introduce herself, suspended in midair and floating down into Munchkinland at the start of ”Wicked,” the new $14 million Broadway musical that takes place in the fictionally familiar land of Oz and opens at the […]
Forget what you know — or what you think you know — about those two powerful forces in the land of Oz, Glinda the Good Witch and her nameless nemesis, the Wicked Witch of the West. In Wicked, the new musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, audience […]