Audra kicks off the second half of her fall tour this Saturday with a concert at Houston’s Wortham Center. This performance marks the Tony award-winner’s first return to Houston since she made her Houston Grand Opera debut in 2006 in a double-bill of monodramas. The following day, Audra brings her “incredible voice, with its unique blend of sunshine and shade” (Toronto Star) to the Long Center in Austin. Audra then makes her way to the west coast for concerts in Las Vegas (Oct 22), San Diego (Oct 25), and LA (Oct 26). Audiences around the country can see Audra on television later this season when she takes on the role of the Mother Abess in NBC’s live production of Rodger and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. Click here for a full list of Audra’s concert appearances this fall.

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.”