Many of us know you from Broadway and television (Wicked, The West Wing, Glee, Pushing Daisies), but performances like this are a little more intimate. What is special to you about tours like this one?
Every audience is different. Every town is different. What’s the most fun is listening to the audience and having the relationship between the audience and the artist. If I do my job, people will leave having cried, laughed and forgotten about their problems in just a few hours.
Are you looking forward to visiting Louisiana?
The last time I was there, I did a movie in a tiny town. I fell in love with people. The time before that, I opened the Saenger [Theatre] in New Orleans after Katrina. I even got the keys to the city of New Orleans. Is it wrong of me that I consider myself part Louisianan? One of my best friends, the prolific and talented writer Bobby Harling, hails from Louisiana. When you’re friends with someone like that, I feel OK about adopting their home state.
Your album is titled The Art of Elegance. What is elegance to you?
Elegance has a lot of different meanings to me. Elegance is the way a woman wears her hair. The way someone speaks. A certain song. Perfume. Love. There’s an art to it all. There’s an arc to it. I tried on the album to show both.
The album is a compilation of romantic standards. Can you tell us about that and how you’re touring with it right now?
My concert isn’t The Art of Elegance, per se. I do different songs on different nights in different towns from the album. I switch it up. Every song on the album, though, was picked for a reason. From Gershwin to Porter to Sinatra—they are all love songs. Songs about past love, present love and hopefully soulmate love. Songs about heartbreak and being the one doing the heartbreaking. The lyrics stand on their own, which is why they’re classics. Some songs I’ve been singing since college. Some are brand new to me.
What can audiences expect from this performance?
A little bit of everything. This is my sixth album. I like to represent songs I’m known for but also include songs that no one would expect from me. That means there are no rules. The audience or the listener will be asked to go on different journeys from country to pop rock to music theater to opera. But really what I’m asking, what I’m wanting, is for people to listen to the words and have whatever feelings or emotion the song brings out in them.
“An Evening of Elegance With Kristin Chenoweth,”hosted by the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra.
March 16, 8 p.m., at the Baton Rouge River Center Theatre.
For more information, visit brso.org.
This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.
