THE ESSENTIAL A&E PICKS FOR NOV 9 - 15 

• Allison Michael Orenstein

Audra McDonald with Utah Symphony
There are any number of ways to measure the trajectory of performer's rise from "who's that" to "legend." Take the case of Audra McDonald, for example, and her elevation to the status of Broadway superstar. It took literally a year from the time she graduated from Juilliard to winning her first Tony Award, for the Lincoln Center Theater (see below) revival of Carousel in 1994. She then earned Tony Awards for Featured Actress again in 1996 (for Terrence McNally's Master Class) and in 1998 (for the original Broadway production of Ragtime), making her the first actor in Broadway history to earn three such awards before the age of 30.

That could safely be considered a pretty great career by any standard—except that McDonald was only getting started. Three more Tony Awards would follow: in 2004 for A Raisin in the Sun; in 2012 for Porgy and Bess; in 2014 for Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill. Not only does that make her the most awarded actor in the history of the Tony Awards, but the only actor to win in all four competitive acting categories: Lead and Featured in a Musical, and Lead and Featured in a Drama. There are stars, there are legends, and then there's Audra McDonald.

Audra McDonald joins the Utah Symphony with conductor Andy Einhorn for three performances, beginning Thursday, Nov. 9 at Ogden's Austad Auditorium (3750 Harrison Blvd.) at 7:30 p.m., then on Nov. 10 – 11 at Abravanel Hall (123 S. West Temple) at 7:30 p.m. Tickets begin at $42; visit utahsympony.org or arttix.org to purchase tickets and for additional event information. (Scott Renshaw)

• Addie Ryder

Art + Wellness: Mindfulness @ Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Charlotte Bell is no newcomer to yoga and mindfulness practices, with training that stretches back some 40 years. Nor is she inexperienced when it comes to visual art, with an extensive family history of artists and her own college study. Still, it presents a unique challenge to combine those two areas, as she does when leading "Art + Wellness" classes in mindfulness at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

Bell prepares for her classes by exploring the museum before each session, getting ideas about how to connect the works currently on display with the particular mindfulness concept—mindfulness of breath, of thought, of the body, etc.—she is working with for that session. And it can lead to some interesting discoveries, as happened with a recent session on body mindfulness. "The Dutch had one particular concept about the body, where it was basically cover it up, in this particular time period," Bell says; "in the same basic time period, the French were totally different. Then look at East Indian depictions of gods and goddesses, again, it's totally different. The point was to help people understand that the way we look at the body is based on an idea, and maybe it's not really true. To experience it from the inside is the point of mindfulness."

Mindfulness sessions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (410 Campus Center Dr.) continue Thursdays through Dec. 7, 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. Sessions are free with museum admission, and free to university students, faculty and staff. Visit umfa.utah.edu for schedule and additional event information. (SR)

• Jeremy Daniel

Lincoln Center Theater: My Fair Lady
Some shows take their place in an elevated tier of the American musical theater canon: The King & I, South Pacific, My Fair Lady. For more than a decade, the Lincoln Center Theater and director Bartlett Sher have set themselves the goal of mounting sumptuous revivals of these beloved shows, and My Fair Lady is the most recent of these to tour around the country. But by no means should they be thought of as creaky artifacts from a bygone age.

Indeed, the narrative has been given a decidedly contemporary twist. The familiar story, based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, remains the same: a Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle becomes a bit of a pawn in a wager made by Professor Henry Higgins, who believes he can turn someone of low birth into someone who could believably mingle in high society. The songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe are still some of the ear-wormiest ditties ever to grace a stage, from "The Street Where You Live" to "I Could Have Danced All Night" to "Wouldn't it Be Lover-ly." But here you'll also find an Eliza who's no mere victim; as NYT's Jesse Green put it during the initial 2018 New York run, Sher's production "uses the current climate of re-examination not only to restore the show's feminist argument ... but also to warm it up considerably."

The Lincoln Center Theater production of My Fair Lady comes to the Eccles Theater (131 S. Main St.) for eight performances, Nov. 12 – 18. Times vary by date, and tickets begin at $55. Visit arttix.org to purchase tickets and for additional event information. (SR)