Arts & Entertainment

Menzel’s magic

Broadway powerhouse brings summer tour to Wolf Trap next week

Published

14 years ago

July 26, 2012

Singer Idina Menzel balances motherhood, touring, Broadway and Hollywood in a busy career but says she enjoys the concerts most. (Photo courtesy Concord Music Group)

‘An Evening with Idina Menzel’
Aug. 3, 8:15 p.m.
Wolf Trap Filene Center
1551 Trap Rd.
Vienna, VA
Tickets range from $20 (lawn) to $100 (orchestra pit)
Idinamenzel.com

Pretty much any veteran live performer will say they have some little personal “trick” they use to keep their most oft-performed material fresh. For Idina Menzel and her trademark “Wicked” showstopper “Defying Gravity,” it’s sometimes a gay teen — perhaps with a little projecting — that helps get her through the song.

Well, that and what she describes as kind of obligation she has to the star-making material.

“That song is a personal gift to me,” she says. “I have a personal debt I owe to that music. Because I have to sing it so much, people ask if it gets monotonous. I can truthfully say that doesn’t happen because every time I sing it, I come from a different place. It could be the young 14-year-old boy in the front row singing it along with me who may not have come out yet. I know how much the song means to him, so I can sing it to him that night. I think it’s a testament to how well written a song it is that it can speak to so many different people.”

Menzel brings her summer tour to Wolf Trap next week for her only D.C.-area appearance. The Tony winner, who’s become a household name since she debuted in “Rent” in 1996 and later in “Wicked” in 2003, also varies her set list slightly from city to city, another show-freshening trick she swears by. She’ll perform in Virginia with the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Steven Reineke.

“I’m excited about the show not only because of the material I’m doing, but because I feel like I’ve found a way to make every city have a show that’s unique to them,” Menzel, 41, says. “People should know when they come to see the show they can leave feeling like they got to know a little piece of who I am and it’s not the same everywhere. Every city’s just a little bit different.”

“I’ve been doing it with the symphony for almost three years already, which I truly love. It’s been a wonderful experience for me, which is why I continue to do it,” Menzel says. “There’s an intimacy I’m able to maintain even though I have all these musicians behind me. I had to strike a balance with it early on. It was a little bit of work for me to figure out how to do that, but now it’s pretty natural and organic.”

Even after appearing in two seasons of “Glee” and in films like “Rent” and Disney’s “Enchanted,” Menzel still finds singing live to be her favorite brand of performance.

“I definitely thrive off of the live audience and the adrenaline of being in the moment,” she says.

In 2009, Menzel had her first child, son Walker, with fellow Broadway actor and husband Taye Diggs. Before motherhood, Menzel had a strict regimen for keeping her vocals up, but now being more flexible with her schedule as a mother has only enhanced her performance experiences, she says.

“The more I sing the better for me. I’m like a marathon runner as far as running everyday. So that’s kind of how I approach it — athletically. And I’m just finding that being a mom and having a little boy now has changed my whole perspective on that. I used to have such a ritual and routine that I still try to keep, but if I deviate from it I’m a little less hard on myself, and in return I feel like the rewards are greater for me professionally. I may not be as prepared vocally, but then I’m on stage and I feel more free.”

Menzel’s summer tour includes old favorites from her roles on Broadway in “Wicked” and “Rent,” as well as other hits featured in her concert “Barefoot at the Symphony” that aired on PBS and has now been released on DVD.

“There are a few songs I wouldn’t leave stage without singing. I’m constantly changing [the set list], trying to tell different stories,” Menzel says. “It’s half and half music people would expect and the other stuff is new stuff I want to challenge myself with.”

Looking back, Menzel finds that she was in very different places in life during her appearances on “Glee” in the show’s first and third seasons. She was still adjusting to being a mom while filming the first season, but during the filming of the third season was more used to juggling parenthood and her career.

“The last season I was on I enjoyed it a lot more. I was learning how to balance motherhood and work for myself. I was enjoying the cast and I didn’t have to run home every second to pump my boobs or whatever,” Menzel says. “I hope [the cast] are all really appreciating it and enjoying it in the moment because you can easily lose sight of how incredible it is. I would love to do more TV, but my definitive wish was to get back to New York and do another show.”

In addition to touring, Menzel is working on a number of projects. She’s working alongside composers of original pieces for new musicals to act as a “muse,” singing and doing readings of their work so they can hear the results of their writing. She’s also thrilled to start work as Elsa in a new Disney movie called “Frozen” set for release in 2013.

“It’s amazing for me, like a dream,” she says. “It’s an animated Disney movie and there’s lots of music in it. It’s a beautiful story, and we just got started.”

And yes, as clichéd as it might sound for a Broadway powerhouse, Menzel is aware and appreciative of her gay following.

“I did the Atlantis cruise ship with 1,000 gay men and I had probably the greatest time I’ve ever had,” she says.

Though on one hand she says it makes no difference — “an audience is an audience, made up of all different kinds of people” — she says the gay kids who tell her “Wicked” helped them come out mean a lot.

“All that kind of stuff is part of the benefits I reap from what I do for a living. It enriches me as a person and I feel like everyone’s in it together out there.”

Gay conductor to lead NSO for Menzel show

By BRIAN T. CARNEY

Steven Reineke conducts for Idina Menzel next week at Wolf Trap. (Photo by Michael Tammaro)

Maestro Steven Reineke says his friend Idina Menzel wouldn’t want him to say too much about what she’ll be singing at their upcoming performance with the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap.

But he does mention, “She covers a lot of material in her set. And she tells great stories. She’s very interactive with the audience. There’s even some audience participation.”

He’s more forthcoming about the first half of the program, which will start with one of his own compositions. The gay composer and conductor wrote “Celebration Fanfare” when he was 25 (he turns 42 in September) and notes that the piece is still performed frequently by orchestras and concert bands across the country. The work is dedicated to Erich Kunzel, conductor of the Cincinnati Pops, who served as a mentor to Reineke and encouraged his career as both composer and conductor.

Reineke resisted the temptation to start the evening with his own version of “Defying Gravity,” though Reineke’s piece was written to celebrate another kind of flight — the centennial of the Wright Brother flight. He says it’s a funny coincidence that Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz used the same title for the Act I finale of “Wicked,” a number that has become a signature piece for Menzel.

“We just happened to come up with the same title. They have nothing to do with each other whatsoever,” he says.

Reineke started composing when he was a teenager. He remembers, “I had all this music running around my head. I started to plunk things out on the piano because I just needed to get these songs out. It wasn’t really a conscious choice.”

It was also about that time he realized he was gay.

”I came out to myself when I was 17 years old, a senior in high school getting ready to go off to college. I’ll never forget having that cathartic moment when I stared in the mirror and said the words out loud, ‘I am gay.’ That was the hardest part about the process.”

As he began his professional life, Reineke remained open about his sexuality and says it was “a no brainer” because “I was never really in. The more notoriety I got, the more it came up, and I’m just not the kind of person to deny it. I just treat it as a very normal part of life. There was no big coming out.”

Reineke isn’t sure why the “classical closet” (cultural critic K. Robert Schwarz’s term for the dearth of classical musicians who are openly LGBT) still persists so strongly. He does note, “I do wish that more people would treat is as a non-issue, whether they’re in the arts, or sports figures, or television or whatever.”

Staying in the closet, he says, only perpetuates myths.

“That’s one thing that keeps the stigma about it. People staying buried instead of saying, ‘Here I am, deal with it.’”

His sexuality has not played a major role in his musical career. As a composer, he often takes his cue from the visual and visceral imagery he finds in mythology and nature. Reineke, who initially wanted to be a film composer, says he needs a visual image in mind before he starts composing: “Basically I’m creating a soundtrack to my own movie in my own head.”

As a conductor and music director (he’s also music director of the New York Pops and the principal pops conductor for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra here in Washington), Reineke says his focus is on the audience and the musicians.

“I have no particular agenda other than the health and success of the orchestra and the good times had by an audience.”

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FUND LGBTQ JOURNALISM

Movies

The queer appeal of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’

Tying the feminist and LGBTQ rights movements together on screen

Published

23 hours ago

May 2, 2026

John Paul King

Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2.’ (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios)

“Would we have fashion without gay people? Forgive me, would we have anything?”

Those words, spoken by Miranda Priestley herself (actually by Meryl Streep, the 76-year-old acting icon who played her), may well sum up why “The Devil Wears Prada” has been a touchstone for queer audiences for two decades now.

Streep, who returns to big screens this weekend in the sequel to director David Frankel’s beloved 2006 classic (succinctly titled “The Devil Wears Prada 2”), expressed this nugget of allyship in a recent interview with Out magazine, promoting the new film’s upcoming release. It would be hard, as a member of the queer community, to disagree with her assessment. The world of fashion has always been inextricably linked with queer culture, and the whims of taste that drive it are so frequently shaped by queer men – and women, too – who have adopted it as a means of expressing their sense of identity from the very first time they thumbed through a copy of Vogue.

At the same time, the notion that “Prada” has been claimed by the community as “canon” simply because of the stereotypical idea that “gay people love fashion” feels like a lazy generalization. After all, fashion is about discernment – about knowing, if you will, whether a sweater is simply blue or if it is cerulean, and, importantly, understanding why it matters – and just because something ticks off a few basic boxes, that doesn’t mean it qualifies as “haute couture.”

So yes, the setting of the “Devil Wears Prada” universe in what might be called “ground zero” of the fashion industry plays a part in piquing queer interest, but to assume our obsession with it is explained as simply as that is, frankly, insulting. The fashion angle catches our interest, but it’s the story – and, more to the point, the central characters (all of which return in the sequel) – that reels us in.

First, there’s the ostensible heroine, Anne Hathaway’s Andrea (or rather, Andy) Sachs, who falls into the world of fashion almost by accident. She’s a recent college grad who wants to be a journalist, to write for a publication that operates on a less-superficial level than Runway magazine, but fate (for lack of a better word) places her in the job that “a million girls” would kill to have – assistant to Streep’s Miranda Priestly (based on Vogue editor Anna Wintour), who can determine an entire season’s fashion trends merely by pursing her lips. She’s idealistic, and dismissive of fashion in the overall scheme of human existence; she’s also stuck with a truly terrible boyfriend (Nate, played by Adrian Grenier) and trying to live up to the self-imposed expectations and ideals that have been foisted upon her since birth.

It’s clear from the start that none of this “fits” her particularly well. More significantly, the natural grace with which she blossoms, from “sad girl” fashion-victim to the epitome of effortless style, tells us that she was meant to be exactly where she is, all along.

Then, of course, there is Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the ever-loyal art director and “Gay Best Friend” that’s always there to provide just the right saving touch for both Miranda and Andy, helping to boost the former while gifting the latter with his own insight, “tough love,” and impeccable taste. Never mind that he’s a queer character played by a straight actor – Tucci avoids stereotype and performative flamboyance by simply playing it with pure, universally relatable authenticity – or that he ends up, at the end of the original film, betrayed by his goddess yet deferring his own dream to double down on his commitment to hers. Anyone who has ever been a gay man in the orbit of a remarkable woman knows exactly how he feels. Of course, they also probably know the precarious life of being a queer person in the workplace – something that carries its own set of compromises, disappointments, and determinations to go above-and-beyond just to make oneself invaluable to the powers that be.

Which brings us to Emily (Emily Blunt), the cutthroat “first assistant” who does her level best to keep Andy in her place, who goes to extremes (“I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight”) to be the “favorite” no matter how much cruelty she has to unleash on those who threaten her status. Some see her as merely an obstacle in the way of Andy’s rise to success, an antagonist whose efforts to embody the “no mercy” persona of an ascendent girl boss only expose her own mediocrity. But for many, she’s just another victim doomed to fail and fall while watching others rise to the top. Queer, straight, or in-between, who among us hasn’t been there?

Finally, of course, there is Streep’s Miranda Priestley, the presumed “devil” of the title and the epitome of mercilessly autocratic authority, who has earned her status and her power by embracing the toxic modus operandiof a misogynistic hierarchy in order to conquer it. Yes, she’s more than just a little horrible, a strict gatekeeper who hones in on perceived weaknesses with all the vicious premeditation of a hawk with its eyes on a luckless rabbit, and it would be easy to despise her if she weren’t so damn fabulous. But thanks to the incomparable Oscar-nominated performance from Streep – along with the glimpses we are afforded into her “real” life along the way – she is not just aspirational, but iconic. Stoic, imperturbable, always three steps ahead and never affording an inch of slack for any perceived shortcoming, there’s an undeniable excellence about her that inspires us to see beyond the obvious dysfunction of the “work ethic” she represents; and sure, there’s enough emotionally detached enthusiasm in her torment/training of Andy to fuel countless volumes of erotic lesbian fan-fiction (Google “MirAndy,” if you dare), but when we eventually recognize that she might just be the ultimate “fashion victim” of them all, it doesn’t just cut us to the core – it strikes a chord that should be universally recognizable to anyone who has had to make their own “deal with the devil” in order to claim agency in their own lives. In this way, “The Devil Wears Prada” comes closer than probably any mainstream film to tying the feminist and queer rights movements together in common cause.

In any case, each character, in their way, can easily be tied to a facet of queer identity – and indeed, to the identity of anyone who must work twice (or more) as hard as a straight white Christian male to succeed. We can see ourselves reflected in all of them – and whether we aspire to be Miranda (I mean, who wouldn’t?), identify with Andy, recognize our worst traits in Emily, or empathize with Nigel and his deferential suffering, there’s something in “The Devil Wears Prada” that resonates with everyone.

Now let’s see if the sequel can say the same.

Out & About

Lesbifriends Travel to host queer night out

DC Power FC game to be held at Audi Field

Published

23 hours ago

May 2, 2026

Tinashe Chingarande

(Photo by Inked Pixels/Bigstock)

Lesbifriends Travel will host “Queer Night Out: DC Power FC Game” on Wednesday May 6 at 7 p.m. at Audi Field.

This will be a fun night out as DC Power FC takes the field at Audi Field, kicking off with a happy hour meetup in Navy Yard before the group walks to the stadium together. Lesbifriends and Travel group will be seated together in the stands, making it easy to connect, cheer, and enjoy the game with people who just feel like your people.

More details are available on Eventbrite.

Calendar

Calendar: May 1-7

LGBTQ events in the days to come

Published

2 days ago

May 1, 2026

Tinashe Chingarande

Friday, May 1

Go Gay DC will host “First Friday LGBTQ+ Community Social” at 7 p.m. at Silver Diner Ballston. This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.

“Illusions The Drag Queen Show Washington, D.C.” will be at 7 p.m. at 2323 18th St., N.W. Come see this amazing D.C. drag show and laugh all night long while being amazed by the stellar performances in tribute to some of your old-time favorite classics as well as the latest pop favorites. Come see the likes of Madonna, Cher, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, Beyoncé, Pink, and many more. Tickets are $12.97 and are available on Eventbrite.

Saturday, May 2

Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11:00a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.

Drag Queen Sip and Paint Washington DC will be at 4 p.m. at Town Tavern DC. This event combines the joy of painting with the lively energy of a drag queen, offering an hour and a half of fun, creativity, and entertainment. Participants paint a canvas while enjoying cocktails, all under the guidance of a glamorous drag queen host. Tickets are $47.19 and are available on Eventbrite.

Monday, May 4

“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).

Tuesday, May 5

Universal Pride Meeting will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This group seeks to support, educate, empower, and create change for people with disabilities. For more details, email [email protected].

Wednesday, May 6

Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.

Center Aging Women’s Social and Discussion Group will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom. This group is a place where older LGBTQ+ women can meet and socialize with one another. There will be discussion, activities, and a chance for guests to share what they want future events to include. For more information, email [email protected].

Thursday, May 7

The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.

Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.