Ever since making her debut, Jessica Molaskey has made audiences swoon with her unique voice and commanding stage presence. From great Broadway spectacles like Chess, Cats and Sunday in the Park with George, to the intimacy of her shows at Cafe Carlyle with her husband John Pizzarelli, she has set a pretty high standard for what it means to be a great singer. On May 30th Ms. Molaskey will join radio host Jonathan Schwartz for a concert titled Portraits of Joni: Jessica Molaskey Sings Joni Mitchell. We had the opportunity to talk to her about this tribute, as well as other highlights of her career.

The May 30th show will be recorded to be broadcast later, have you prepared anything extra special for this?

No, I did the show in 2014 at Lincoln Center for the American Songbook series and Jonathan Schwartz saw it and wanted me to do it at NJPAC.

Having done the Joni Mitchell concert before, do you discover new things about the songs during each performance?

I’ve only done the show once before, but my husband and I do jazz or bossa nova takes of music, so we interpret the music in our own vernacular.

You said once that “Both Sides Now” is the darkest song ever written. Do you still feel that way?

Yeah, “Both Sides Now” is getting to a place in your life where you realize that you don’t know anything about anything. It’s a very singular sentiment, in terms of having that idea in a song.

You are known for interpreting music using acting techniques and revealing things about songs that people weren’t aware where there…

That’s what I think is so interesting about Joni Mitchell, her songs are like little plays, she writes them like little stories, for instance there’s thing song called “Marcie” that’s story about this very elusive woman, and it actually has a beginning, a middle and an end, so you can perform that as an actor.

Do you find yourself doing songs in different ways as a sort of exercise? Like doing “Blue” in a more comedic way for instance…

I think all actors interpret things through their own filter, and yes, sometimes you can put a twist on them, things that people would’ve never thought of. I try to bring as much of myself as possible, sometimes that means setting it in a different tempo or doing it with an ironic tilt.

Do you find that there is a lack of connection between music and emotions in recent Broadway shows?

Actually no, I just saw Fun Home and I thought it was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen. You have something like Something Rotten! that can be silly but there’s also emotion in that. I think honestly that today, in this day and age, we have some of the most skilled actors that can sing, they can go from speaking to singing in such an effortless manner. In a perfect world you should forget that people are singing, that’s how I feel about musicals, people like Christian Borle, Brian d’Arcy James, Michael Cerveris and Judy Kuhn are doing it so beautifully!

You seem to have taken a “less is more” approach to music, which is perhaps the opposite of what’s going on in theatre.

I spent a lot of years screaming. I did shows like Tommy on Broadway and I did a lot of stuff with Jason Robert Brown and he demands a lot of hard technical singing, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I got to a point where I just wanted to make people lean in a little bit. My husband and I have a radio show and I get a lot of Broadway CDs that they make of standards, and I can’t really play them because they oversing. One thing is to be standing on a stage doing contemporary music but when you’re doing an album you don’t have to scream.

You were in The Sound of Music which featured many other Broadway artists. Can you comment on the importance of NBC’s live musicals in bringing awareness of theatre to the rest of the country?

You think about it and over 19 million people saw that broadcast, something that’s unheard of nowadays. When I was a little girl we had things like The Ed Sullivan Show and every Sunday night Broadway people would appear on the show, and that’s how I knew about it, that’s how I fell in love with Broadway. People who live in Texas or Nebraska or Montana maybe didn’t know who Rodgers and Hammerstein were, so to be able to touch somebody’s heart is great. I’m sure that some little boy or some little girl fell in love with the idea of singing in a musical from that television show. I think one of the things about the show, having seen it afterwards, is that it’s very difficult to capture in a bottle just how exciting the live element was. We were talking for example about how they do it in Saturday Night Live, where sometimes they’ll pull out the camera and show you the backstage set, I people could’ve seen the scrambling and running. We shot this in a sort of airplane hangar, it was pretty crazy but it was a remarkable group of people.

Apologies for the cheesy segue, but speaking of the von Trapp family, your shows are family affairs with your husband playing the guitar and your daughter does backup vocals. Do you spend your free time making music with them as well?

It’s funny, my daughter is going to be performing with me at NJPAC, she performed with me at Lincoln Center and it’s been sort of like a natural progression because I wanted to sing with somebody who had an authentically folk kind of voice, and that could play that kind of guitar and she was the only person I could think of. I don’t know a better musician alive than my husband, so I just think, why would you wanna call anybody else? (Laughs)

You did Sunday in the Park with George, what other Sondheim characters would you like to play?

I fell in love with Stephen Sondheim when I was a teenager and came to New York with the mission of meeting him and being in one of his shows with Hal Prince. I’ve been in two of Steve’s shows and three of Hal’s, I think I wore him down with my love. Now he comes to see us every year and he’s been very nice, sometimes we change his songs a little bit, we turn them into jazz, and he’s just come to the point where he says (lowers her voice) “it’s very flattering, it’s very flattering”. He’s a genius and Sunday in the Park with George is a masterpiece, and to have been a small part of it was a life-affirming event for me. That kind of show is so interesting, the stage was built at Studio 54 and usually with most shows once your scene is done, you go backstage for a few minutes, but in that show everyone sat in stools in the back. Nobody left the stage, everyone just sat in stools just waiting for their cue, like we were in church. It was too beautiful for us to leave. It’s the only show I’ve ever done where I didn’t go back to my dressing room, it was just too beautiful.

There’s a Twitter account dedicated to the idea of bringing back Parade, so about once a day they tweet “Revive Parade”...

(Laughs) That’s very funny.

What do you think it will take to see a Parade revival anytime soon?

It’s really interesting, I saw it at Avery Fisher Hall with that orchestra and a huge 200 piece chorus, and I just couldn’t stop crying. It was that sort of thing, where when we were doing it at Lincoln Center it felt like we were doing West Side Story, it was so unique and the music was just so potent. Jason [Robert Brown] was so young and the music that was pouring out of him...oh my god. Then when we were doing it onstage it was the most bizarre thing, at the end of the first act and everyone’s dancing and saying “guilty, guilty, guilty”, the first night and the second night there was this weird sound coming from the audience and I realized by the third night that people were booing. I’d never experienced that in a show, people had such polarizing thoughts about that show, they chased Hal Prince up the aisles yelling at him. I went to a Christmas party and a guy scolded me, I had to remind him it was just a show, and I was just an actor. I went see Rob Ashford’s production at the Donmar Warehouse in London and it was transcendent, it was wonderful. I think something’s gonna happen with that particular production...I think Rob wants to do something really interesting with it. I hope so.

I hope so too!

I think at this point in time, Jason Robert Brown is the way Stephen Sondheim was when he was starting out. It takes time for people to realize something is really great, I think people will feel that way about Honeymoon in Vegas, the score for that is freaking brilliant, like anything that Frank Loesser wrote. Sondheim wrote Jason a letter and basically said the same thing...for some reason people aren’t getting it. And The Bridges of Madison County...nobody has written a score like that, nobody and people don’t go, I don’t get it! I just hope Jason keeps making music because it would be tragic if he didn’t.

Portraits of Joni: Jessica Molaskey Sings Joni Mitchell will be presented May 30th at NJPAC. For tickets and more click here.