Heat Wave.(110 in the Shade)(Theater review)

The thirty-six-year-old Audra McDonald is a kind of musical Diana Sands, the revolutionary black actress of the fifties and sixties who broke through New York theatre's racial barriers: a performer so freakishly gifted that you wonder how she does it. Blessed with a beauty and an intelligence that feel entirely accessible--she's the girl next door, without a trace of snootiness--McDonald sings and acts for our delectation because she has talent to spare. Why not share it? It's hard to keep up with McDonald. She has barely finished one number in Lonny Price's splendid revival of the 1963 musical "110 in the Shade" (a Roundabout Theatre production at Studio 54) before she's on to the next series of glittering moments that make her Lizzie Curry such a full-blooded creature.

Lizzie is a spinster. She lives in a small house in the Depression-era Texas Panhandle with her father and her two brothers (Chris Butler and Bobby Steggert, who, as the younger of the two, is an especially winning combination of goofiness and matinee-idol cuteness). Her father, H.C. (John Cullum), is not so much a paternal figure as a supportive observer. His daughter cooks and cleans with a fussy cheerfulness and determination that fail to disguise her loneliness--you can see her struggling not to frown as her brothers question her about this or that possible suitor. The only woman in her world, Lizzie is the source of the family's emotional well-being. She doesn't want to let them down, not even for a minute.

When Lizzie's father and brothers try to help her out by arranging a date with the local sheriff, File (Christopher Innvar), she puts on a white cotton dress and bakes a lemon pie. The prospect of finally finding a lover moves her to act, not to dream. When File doesn't show up, however, Lizzie doesn't know what to do with the pie or with herself in that impractical dress: she treats them both as props in a wedding that she will never have. Soon she does begin to dream, and those dreams are made manifest by Starbuck (the lovely Steve Kazee), a strong dark-haired charlatan who promises to bring a little precipitation to the arid atmosphere--the area is in the grip of a terrible drought. ("110 in the Shade" was written by N. Richard Nash as an adaptation of his 1954 play, "The Rainmaker"; the music is by Harvey Schmidt, the lyrics by Tom Jones.) Starbuck also helps Lizzie to blossom. In his presence, she becomes the woman that her responsibilities have kept her from being: a sexual one. (You get the sense that Lizzie has held herself back from love because she feels married to her family.)

As Lizzie moves away from the despair of File's rejection and into, then out of, Starbuck's arms, McDonald carries us through a range of emotions that are both subtle and comedically satisfying. While Jones's lyrics are adequate, they would be nothing without McDonald's ability to mine them for meaning. She treats them as an essential part of the show's text: little poems that it is her job to parse. (As McDonald has shown, for example, with her rendition--on her latest CD--of Elvis Costello's song "God Give Me Strength," which wrecks the heart, when she is given the right lyrics the marriage between voice and intention is flawless.)

For those audience members who have seen McDonald only in her sporadic television appearances--on "The Bedford Diaries" or "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"--her Lizzie is a revelation. In Mike Nichols's 2001 TV-movie version of Margaret Edson's play "Wit," McDonald struck me as a serviceable actress, but not a standout. Watching her in this production of "110 in the Shade," which beautifully ignores race and casts black and white performers alike in key roles (File and Starbuck are both played by white actors), I felt a certain melancholy. I was reminded of how underused--or poorly used--actresses like McDonald continue to be onscreen, where they would reach larger audiences. If movies were as color-blind as they ...