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" She dazzled in her 1996 Broadway debut as the performance artist Maureen in Rent; she blew the house down (and won a 2004 Tony) with her Valkyrie belting as the under-witch Elphaba in Wicked. But If/Then, the new musical with which Idina Menzel makes her \u2028return to Broadway this month, provides the powerhouse performer, now 42, with a different kind of challenge. She plays Elizabeth, a city planner emerging from a failed marriage. And she also plays Liz, a city planner emerging from a failed marriage. They&amp;#039;re the same woman, of course; the show extrapolates her life in two different directions from one moment of choice. We spoke to Menzel about her own divergent paths as actress and mother; she has a four-year-old son, Walker, with her Rent costar Taye Diggs, from whom she recently separated. You have a reputation as a workhorse, which must be helpful in &amp;#039;If/Then&amp;#039;: You&amp;#039;re onstage almost the whole show. I started singing weddings and bar mitzvahs at 15, lying about my age. It was a great discipline. But Rent was so traumatizing I had to go back to my voice teacher and relearn how to sing. That&amp;#039;s when I started keeping a very strict regimen and taking great pride in showing up feeling stronger on Sunday, at the end of an eight-performance week, than when it started on Tuesday. Has that changed, 18 years later? Now that I have a child, I&amp;#039;m less anal about my process and I take the pressure off myself to be perfect. If I want to tuck my son into bed and read him a story but that means I have to take a red-eye to get to a concert\u2014which \u2028I would never think of doing otherwise\u2014that&amp;#039;s just the way it is. Even if I can&amp;#039;t hit the note that night, I got to tuck my child in! And actually I usually have a better show. Do the songs in &amp;#039;If/Then&amp;#039; exploit that \u2028pyrotechnical aspect of your voice? For me, it&amp;#039;s nice that I&amp;#039;m not belting at the top of my lungs the whole time. There&amp;#039;s a lot of intimate, personality-driven, sweet singing, and that&amp;#039;s the kind I actually love the most, as close to how we speak as possible. I do get to do the crazy high notes, of course. But that&amp;#039;s also a part of me. I&amp;#039;m full spectrum. A vulnerable side and a side that wants to kick ass. You&amp;#039;ve mostly created new roles. Has that been deliberate? It&amp;#039;s been deliberate since Wicked, for sure. The best feeling in the world is to stand there with a composer who has a new song for you. Of course, it&amp;#039;s really hard to do original musicals, and If/Then is really original. And an acting challenge I love. How do you define one person who goes two different ways? You&amp;#039;ve been doing that, in a way, from the beginning. Maureen, Elphaba\u2026 There has to be a balance between power and vulnerability. That&amp;#039;s something I feel I have in my own life, something I struggle with and\u2014on a good day\u2014like about myself. Not to say I wouldn&amp;#039;t play a crazy old mean bitch one day. Are there points in your life where you could have gone two very different ways? Anytime I was terrified to step into \u2028a room and audition but decided to do it anyway. And having a child. Saying I&amp;#039;m not \u2028going to worry about my career right now, and go off birth control, and not worry about getting fat, but just make a choice and go with that. I don&amp;#039;t do too much looking back and regretting things\u2014not that I haven&amp;#039;t made tons of mistakes. But I do think people are in our lives so we can learn lessons and evolve as better human beings. I love that our show opens that conversation. You had a great arc on &amp;#039;Glee&amp;#039; and recently a big movie hit with &amp;#039;Frozen&amp;#039;. What&amp;#039;s it like going back to Broadway? After Rent I tried to make a record and it didn&amp;#039;t work out, and it was the Broadway community that welcomed me back. It&amp;#039;s where \u2028I feel the most understood, most at home. But this is the very first time I&amp;#039;m above the title by myself, so yeah, it&amp;#039;s a big deal! I feel responsibility, I want to sell tickets, I want the ensemble to have their jobs for a long time, I want people to like me, I want to get good reviews. It&amp;#039;s bullshit to say you don&amp;#039;t care about all that. Whether it will run like Wicked\u2014I don&amp;#039;t let myself have those expectations. I&amp;#039;ve already had lightning in a bottle more than once. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/reviews/a13987/idina-menzel-interview/?src=rss>