Background: Audra Ann McDonald (born July 3, 1970) is an American actress and singer. Primarily known for her work on the Broadway stage, she has won six Tony Awards, more performance wins than any other actor, and is the only person to win all four acting categories. She has performed in musicals, operas, and dramas such as A Moon for the Misbegotten, 110 in the Shade, Carousel, Ragtime, Master Class and Porgy and Bess. As a classical soprano, she has performed in staged operas with the Houston Grand Opera and the Los Angeles Opera and in concerts with symphony orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic.
Context: McDonald played Billie Holiday on Broadway in the play Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill in a limited engagement that ended on August 10, 2014. After previews that began on March 25, 2014, the play opened at the Circle in the Square Theatre on April 13, 2014. Of the play, McDonald said in an interview: It's about a woman trying to get through a concert performance, which I know something about, and she's doing it at a time when her liver was pickled and she was still doing heroin regularly...I might have been a little judgmental about Billie Holiday early on in my life, but what I've come to admire most about her - and what is fascinating in this show - is that there is never any self-pity. She's almost laughing at how horrible her life has been. I don't think she sees herself as a victim. And she feels an incredible connection to her music - she can't sing a song if she doesn't have some emotional connection to it, which I really understand. McDonald won the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for this role, making her the first person to earn six Tony Award wins for acting (not counting honorary awards) and the first person to win a Tony Award in all four acting categories. In her acceptance speech, "she thanked her parents for encouraging her to pursue her interests as a child." She also thanked the "strong and brave and courageous" African-American women who came before her, saying in part, "I am standing on Lena Horne's shoulders. I am standing on Maya Angelou's shoulders. I am standing on Diahann Carroll and Ruby Dee, and most of all, Billie Holiday. You deserved so much more than you were given when you were on this planet. This is for you, Billie." This performance was filmed at Cafe Brasil in New Orleans and broadcast on HBO on March 12, 2016. McDonald received a 2016 Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for her role in the broadcast. McDonald had planned to make her West End debut as Holiday in Lady Day in June through September 2016, but after becoming pregnant she postponed these plans. She performed in Lady Day in June 2017 through September 9, 2017, at the Wyndham's Theatre in the West End.
Question: Did she have to audition for the role?
Answer:

Background: Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet (2 June 1857 - 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.
Context: Elgar was contemptuous of folk music and had little interest in or respect for the early English composers, calling William Byrd and his contemporaries "museum pieces". Of later English composers, he regarded Purcell as the greatest, and he said that he had learned much of his own technique from studying Hubert Parry's writings. The continental composers who most influenced Elgar were Handel, Dvorak and, to some degree, Brahms. In Elgar's chromaticism, the influence of Wagner is apparent, but Elgar's individual style of orchestration owes much to the clarity of nineteenth-century French composers, Berlioz, Massenet, Saint-Saens and, particularly, Delibes, whose music Elgar played and conducted at Worcester and greatly admired. Elgar began composing when still a child, and all his life he drew on his early sketchbooks for themes and inspiration. The habit of assembling his compositions, even large-scale ones, from scraps of themes jotted down randomly remained throughout his life. His early adult works included violin and piano pieces, music for the wind quintet in which he and his brother played between 1878 and 1881, and music of many types for the Powick Asylum band. Diana McVeagh in Grove's Dictionary finds many embryonic Elgarian touches in these pieces, but few of them are regularly played, except Salut d'Amour and (as arranged decades later into The Wand of Youth Suites) some of the childhood sketches. Elgar's sole work of note during his first spell in London in 1889-91, the overture Froissart, was a romantic-bravura piece, influenced by Mendelssohn and Wagner, but also showing further Elgarian characteristics. Orchestral works composed during the subsequent years in Worcestershire include the Serenade for Strings and Three Bavarian Dances. In this period and later, Elgar wrote songs and partsongs. W. H. Reed expressed reservations about these pieces, but praised the partsong The Snow, for female voices, and Sea Pictures, a cycle of five songs for contralto and orchestra which remains in the repertory. Elgar's principal large-scale early works were for chorus and orchestra for the Three Choirs and other festivals. These were The Black Knight, King Olaf, The Light of Life, The Banner of St George and Caractacus. He also wrote a Te Deum and Benedictus for the Hereford Festival. Of these, McVeagh comments favourably on his lavish orchestration and innovative use of leitmotifs, but less favourably on the qualities of his chosen texts and the patchiness of his inspiration. McVeagh makes the point that, because these works of the 1890s were for many years little known (and performances remain rare), the mastery of his first great success, the Enigma Variations, appeared to be a sudden transformation from mediocrity to genius, but in fact his orchestral skills had been building up throughout the decade.
Question: what did he comopose?
Answer:
Elgar wrote songs and partsongs.