To commemorate Great Performances‘s 40-year history, PBS will air a special anniversary celebration concert for the Emmy Award-winning series tonight at 9pm ET. For the celebration concert, taped at Lincoln Center last November, Audra sang “Dear Friend” from Harnick and Bock’s She Loves Me as well as Jason Robert Brown’s “Stars and the Moon” from Songs for a New World. Also featured are appearances by Julie Andrews, Don Henley, David Hyde Pierce, Josh Groban, Itzhak Perlman, Peter Martins, Michael Buble, and more. The program will launch this year’s PBS Arts Fall Festival, a multi-platform event anchored by seven films that highlight artists and performances from around the country. Check local listings.

Following concerts in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, Audra heads east this week, continuing her 22-city North America concert tour with performances at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music (Sept 28) and Queens’s Kupferberg Center (Oct 5). She then travels to Washington, D.C. for a special free concert at the Library of Congress on October 10. These concerts come just days after Audra performed for the First Lady of the United States and spouses of Heads of State and Heads of Government who are in New York for the annual UN General Assembly. Visit Audra’s schedule for a full list of performances this fall.

NBC announced today that Audra has joined the cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. The five-time Tony winner will portray Mother Abbess, the head of Nonnberg Abbey, in a live production.  Audra stars opposite Carrie Underwood as the young governess Maria, Stephen Moyer as Captain von Trapp, Laura Benanti as Elsa Schrader, and Christian Borle as Max Dettweiler. The three-hour television event will air on December 5.

On August 30, Live From Lincoln Center will broadcast an expanded edition of “Audra McDonald in Concert: Go Back Home.” The concert, which was the season finale for the Emmy-winning series, was recorded live at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall in early May and features the five-time Tony Award-winner performing songs from her new solo recording for Nonesuch, Go Back Home. New to this 90-minute cut of “Audra McDonald in Concert: Go Back Home” are songs from the original concert including “My Buddy” by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, “Moonshine Lullaby” from Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, “Stars and the Moon” from Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World, and “Virtue” and “Married Love” by Michael John LaChiusa. Click here to watch the original broadcast of “Audra McDonald in Concert: Go Back Home.”

Audra concludes her summer tour with two festival appearances in New England this weekend. On August 24, she takes to Tanglewood for John Williams’s Film Night with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As part of the salute to Hollywood’s rich musical history, she performs selections from such notable films as A Star is Born, State Fair, and The West Point Story. In addition to Maestro Williams, conductor David Newman (son of Alfred and a film composer in his own right) also takes the podium Saturday night. The following afternoon finds Audra in Manchester, Vermont, for the city’s eponymous music festival, singing with the Manchester Pops Orchestra and her music director Andrew Einhorn. For more information on Audra’s summer performances, click here.