As a general rule of thumb, you should never follow someone home. That goes for strangers, dates, and six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald. On Saturday, the Broadway star shared a video recounting a scary experience from the night before, when a fan followed her from the theater where she was performing in Gypsy back to where she was staying.
According to McDonald, this person “snuck around and found me the way I’d exited from the theater last night and followed me all the way to where I was staying, came into the building, and was uncomfortably close.”
When she was finally able to get security to come help her, the person who followed her still seemed to feel they were owed something, McDonald said. “Their response was, ‘Well, hey, I’ve come all the way … ’ and they named some town, some city that they’d come all the way from,” she said. “And they wanted an autograph and felt that they deserved an autograph.”
“That is crossing a big old boundary. I just want to call that out — that’s a big no-no. That’s now messing with my safety, and it’s not right,” McDonald continued.
During her run in Gypsy, which had its final performance on Sunday, McDonald explained that she hadn’t been greeting fans at the stage door for health reasons. In such a vocally demanding show, the actress said she was “trying to conserve what little energy I have, vocal energy, so I can get through the next show and the next show.” McDonald added that she has a kid who she wants to get home to, so she tries to leave the theater as quickly as possible.
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McDonald concluded the video with a little lesson in common decency for Broadway fans. “When you see an actor leave the stage door, if they don’t stop, leave them alone. There is a reason that they’re not stopping, and it has nothing to do with you,” she said. “It’s them protecting their space and peace. If they do stop and wave, take a picture with you, or sign an autograph, great. But please respect the proper boundaries.”
If you want to hoot and holler at Audra McDonald, do it how the rest of us do: from the comfort of our own homes while watching that one really grainy video of her singing “Your Daddy’s Son” in the 1998 Broadway production of Ragtime. It’s called respect.
