Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth brings 'For the Girls' show to Tucson

Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth finds it hard to believe that in all of her years performing she has only done a single show in Tucson — in 2019 with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra as part of the Tucson Desert Song Festival.

After all, she confesses, it’s not like she is a complete stranger: She’s snuck into town a time or two for private vacations.

“I love Tucson a lot,” she said, from the beauty of the Sonoran Desert to the warm dry air that’s good for her longtime battle with Meniere’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that causes vertigo, constant ringing in the ears and other annoyances. “For my voice and ear issues and stuff, the weather just works for me. So I am really excited … to come back to Tucson.”

Chenoweth will perform her encore to that 2019 concert Sunday, Jan. 30, at Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St.

She is performing with backup singers and a full band that includes her fiancé, country music guitarist Josh Bryant.

She and Bryant, who have been together for five years, will do a duet of the Eagles hit “Desperado” as a nod to Tucson native Linda Ronstadt, who scored a hit with the song in 1973. (Eagles founders Don Henley and Glenn Frey were part of Ronstadt’s band, and while their version of the song, which they wrote, was released the same year, it did not become a hit until after Ronstadt’s version.)

Ronstadt is one of the female artists whose songs Chenoweth covered in her seventh studio album “For the Girls,” which she premiered on Broadway in November 2019.

“I had just done it on Broadway and was ready to tour with the show when everything shut down” in March 2020, she said.

“I never really got to do it so I just started integrating it back into my shows,” she said, including her big “Christmas at the Met” show last December.

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“For the Girls” pays tribute to some of Chenoweth’s favorite female entertainers including Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Carole King and Helen Reddy.

“I have a fun version of ‘I Am Woman’ and ‘You Don’t Own Me,’” she said.

She also covers Marvin Hamlisch’s “The Way We Were” from the 1974 Streisand/Robert Redford film of the same name, but since the pandemic, the song has taken on profound new meaning for the singer.

“Now when I go back and sing some of this music, it changes the meaning for me a little bit,” she said after singing the famous opening stanza — “Memories/Light the corners of my mind/Misty watercolor memories/Of the way we were.”

“I couldn’t write it if I wanted to,” she said. “Ultimately it’s the laughter that makes us be together and remember how we were.”

And there will be laughter in her show, Chenoweth said. She has written a couple of silly songs for comic relief and plans to keep the evening upbeat and “full of hope because that’s what we need,” she said.

“That’s what I need right now so I’m imagining that’s what everyone wants,” Chenoweth said.

Her Fox Tucson show is one of a handful she will do since returning to live performances last summer. Her first post-shutdown live show was a sold-out outdoor concert with Utah Symphony in Park City, Utah.

“I walked out there, and I heard the downbeat on the music, and I didn’t expect the audience to stand,” she said, recalling how every one of the nearly 5,000 people in the amphitheater was standing. “It was beautiful.”