It’s only in the final moments of the moving new Broadway revival of Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” that the consummate musician in Audra McDonald emerges.
True, McDonald — the consummate actor — has been onstage for just about two hours at that point. But only when her Frankie sits listening with quiet contemplation to the Debussy composition of the title do we glimpse McDonald’s breathtaking sensitivity to the nuances of music. Frankie, we see in a flash of, well, metaphorical moonlight, has discovered, in the course of an evening of casual sex and extended conversation, how a series of musical notes can communicate the deepest and most complex meanings, and even alter one’s perception of one’s life, and by extension the world.
