Six-time Tony Award winner Audra MacDonald in Provincetown, then it's back to Broadway

Actress Audra McDonald is rushing from a car in New York City, and climbing four flights of stairs, to get to a wardrobe fitting for her series “The Gilded Age” as she talks about her love of Provincetown and her upcoming Aug. 4 concert here.

Filming is about to start on the third season of the just-Emmy Award-nominated HBO hit, in which McDonald plays Dorothy Scott, part of a well-to-do Black family who provides rare costume-drama representation of what was happening in Black communities during that late 19th-century age of excess.

After a series of concerts this spring, including through Australia, McDonald is also readying a 14th Broadway show, following up 2022’s debut of little-known drama “Ohio State Murders” with a recently announced revival of one of the most-famous musicals ever, “Gypsy.”

Don’t expect previews of key Mama Rose songs in Provincetown, though, she says with a laugh: That waits until the classic based on stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her quintessential stage mother previews in November.

Expect the unexpected when Audra McDonald visits

What Provincetown Town Hall audiences can expect is an almost improvisational style with “go-with-the-flow energy” between 30-years-plus friends McDonald and host-accompanist Seth Rudetsky. In the signature interview-concert style created there by SiriusXM Radio host/musician/writer Rudetsky, he’ll typically surprise McDonald with what he says and asks about her life and roles, and often with what he’ll ask her to perform.

It’s a wide repertoire: McDonald’s Broadway shows include "Ragtime," "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" and "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill." She holds records for most Tony-Award wins (six), and as the only female performer to win all four play/musical acting categories.

She says she and Rudetsky have fun being on stage after “growing up together” in their careers, and she’s always game to visit Provincetown, as she has regularly for producer Mark Cortale’s Broadway series since 2013.

"I love coming to Provincetown. It's a very magical, wonderful, open, beautiful place — sort of a utopia of what could be in the rest of the world,” she says. “I love being there with the audiences, the people, and it's just one of my favorite places on Earth.”

Audra McDonald's career spans TV and stage

It’ll be a quick midsummer visit, though, with her upcoming TV and Broadway work. After “Gilded Age,” McDonald, 54, is looking forward to entering a similar vaudeville era as was depicted in her 2016 Broadway show “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.”

With “Shuffle Along” director, George C. Wolfe, McDonald is particularly looking forward to exploring “Gypsy”’s iconic character of Mama Rose — famously played by Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone and more — from a Black woman’s point of view.

“If you do theater, if you love musical theater, you know that musical and you know that role,” she says, noting she’s been considering the part for years. “You look at that role and imagine it in a world where Rose is a Black woman. … To look at this show in this particular way in this era right now, especially where we are with everything going on in the world, it makes sense that (the revival) is coming about now. It’s going to be interesting to hear lines like ‘I was born too soon and I got started too late’ coming from a Black woman.”

And reteaming with Wolfe, whose 2024 lifetime achievement Tony celebrated a career ranging from “Angels in America” to “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk” to “Take Me Out”? “Anybody who gets to work with him comes back completely changed, you become deeper, and you aspire to become a more intelligent and, I think, fearless performer when you have someone like George guiding you. I just wanted to experience this role and this journey with George.”

McDonald also worked with Wolfe for his 2023 film “Rustin,” briefly playing civil-rights leader Ella Baker in that story of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights leader key to making 1963’s March on Washington happen but largely unacknowledged because he was gay. Another small but vital McDonald 2023 film role was portraying Miss Hale, who in Ava DuVernay’s “Origin,” shares her story with author Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as she researches groundbreaking book “Caste.”

Laughing as she tries to get the famous “there are no small parts” quote right, the actress says she jumped at chances to be in both films. “Honestly, if they had asked me to just come down and hold a microphone, I would have done that, too,” McDonald says. “Both of these projects felt like very important pieces that, especially as a Black woman, I just wanted to be part of.”

How to see Audra McDonald in Provincetown

What: Broadway’s Audra McDonald with host/accompanist Seth Rudetsky

When: 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 4

Where: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.

Tickets: $75-$200 (plus service fees)

Reservations and information: ptowntownhall.com

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: 'Sort of a utopia': Broadway great Audra McDonald loves Provincetown