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How is Audra McDonald’s week going?
Try to keep up: On Thursday, she earned her 11th Tony Award nomination for her leading role in the Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” making her the most-nominated performer in Tony history. Then it was off to fittings for the Met Gala, which she attended on Monday as a member of its starry host committee.
In between, she squeezed in five performances as Momma Rose in “Gypsy” and a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles to attempt to upgrade to a Real ID. She was told she already had one.
“I’m a little tired,” she said in a phone interview from the West Side Highway on Saturday, en route to the Majestic Theater for the matinee, “but it’s all been very exciting.”
She arrived on the Met steps on Monday night in the kind of spotlight-snagging attire that her character, the final boss of stage moms, might appreciate. Beneath a sweeping robe that recalled an opera cape, she wore a crepe column gown the color of custard with satin panniers that swept outward from her waist. Silk florets made of refractive diamanté cords cascaded down its center.
When she saw the design, she said, “I gasped.”
The look was created by Charles Harbison, a Los Angeles designer who has also dressed Michelle Obama and Beyoncé. Mr. Harbison, who grew up in North Carolina, said he was inspired by “Daughters of the Dust,” the 1991 film directed by Julie Dash about Gullah women living off the South Carolina and Georgia coast at the turn of the last century. (Many viewers have also connected the film’s distinctive imagery — breezy white skirts, mossy branches arching over a coastline — to Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album, “Lemonade.”)
Mr. Harbison first saw the film when he was in his early 20s and a student at Parsons School of Design in New York. He was struck by how much it reminded him of the matriarchs in his life, he said, who all “had this inherent, utilitarian elegance.”
Ms. McDonald was not short on elegance, either. “There is this kind of Venus-like sensibility I think she carries, this queenlike sort of dignity that I just think is so gorgeous,” Mr. Harbison said in a phone interview.
Last week he met Ms. McDonald in her dressing room at 11 p.m. after a two-show day to fit her in a muslin prototype of the gown. (He remembers her being regal yet welcoming. She remembers being sweaty.)
Ms. McDonald, the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway, said it was especially meaningful to be on the host committee of a Met Gala whose exhibition focuses on the legacy of Black dandyism and the influence of Black style.
“It seems like there are certain elements in our country right now that are trying to erase our history,” she said. Dandyism may be luxurious and beautiful, she said, but at its core, it is an act of resistance.
“Resistance is creativity is resistance,” she said. “And I love that in this era.”
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