Watch Idina Menzel perform

She may be a singer with famously big lungs, but Idina Menzel has had to learn how to speak up for herself and find her own voice.

After two false starts, the Tony award-winning Broadway star and fledgling Hollywood actress has finally made a pop album that could fulfil her wish to break into the charts. But Menzel still faces hurdles: mainstream radio and the music business’s traditional suspicion of musical theatre, for one. What, purists and programmers ask, could a singer best known for blasting out show-stoppers in musicals such as Rent and Wicked on the Great White Way possibly know about the ripped-from-the-chest authenticity of rock? Equally hostile have been the keepers of the Broadway flame, among them the New York theatre critic Ben Brantley, who described Menzel as a “vulpine vocal powerhouse” and sniped at the teenaged fans her role as Elphaba in Wicked (for which she won the Tony) attracted. “When I’m in them theatre, I’m ‘that rock chick’,” the 37-year-old laughs, “and in rock music, I’m ‘the theatre girl’. Talk about falling through the cracks.”

Certainly, Menzel’s voice is a mighty instrument, and an undeniably theatrical one, too. But among the 10 tracks on her new album, I Stand, a song such as Brave, with its huge emotional surges, empowering lyrics and ready emotion, would, if sung by Christina Aguilera, probably scoot up the charts. Produced by, and co-written with, Glen Ballard (who helped craft Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill into the multiplatinum monster it became), the album screams Radio 2, held-aloft cigarette lighters and the closing credits of a Hollywood weepy. If it fails to catch fire, well, none of the people involved in the project can be faulted for not giving it their best shot.

But then, as Menzel herself freely admits, she is a tough sell, beautiful voice and photogenic looks aside. Her CV is all over the place. In Rent, she was a lesbian performance artist (a role she reprised in Chris Columbus’s 2005 film of the musical). In Wicked, she played a green-skinned misfit who overcame society’s ostracisation to triumph. Her first album, 1998’s Still I Can’t Be Still, was regarded as a mess, its pop-soul sonic architecture doing its best to drown out Menzel’s voice. Her second, Here (2004), was a record of Broadway covers. Film roles have included small parts in Kissing Jessica Stein, the New York lesbian-dating movie, and last year’s Disney spoof, Enchanted. Decidedly mixed messages.

“I’m sort of an anomaly,” the singer says. “The versatility has been my gift and my curse all my life. I miss that crossover type of hybrid performer, like Bette Midler. But it’s not the easiest thing for people to write about — or market. The minute someone says, ‘Woman from the musical theatre’, well, she can’t possibly have the integrity of a rock or pop artist, can she?

“I’ve worked with so many songwriters, and as soon as they heard I was ‘that girl from that show’, they wanted to dumb me down. But I don’t think you have to strip the emotion out of your voice in order for someone to listen to you on the radio and want to sing along.”

The Broadway composer Michael John LaChiusa once argued that Menzel’s singing is about much more than what he called her “high belt”. Brantley might disagree, but, as I Stand compellingly demonstrates, the Long Islander can do nuance as convincingly as she can do barnstorming.

In any case, the enduring myth that musical theatre is only about show-must-go-on hoofing and crowd-manipulating big numbers speaks volumes about the prejudices that persist about the genre. Again (of course), Menzel falls between two stools. Her huge success in Wicked allowed people to forget that she was part of the decidedly alternative Rent, and she has, in a sense, been paying a price for Elphaba ever since.

“Rent was a critical triumph,” she says, “but Wicked, partly because it had this huge budget and a lot of spectacle, was different. But every time Ben Brantley wrote something about Idina and her American Idol-style fans, I just had to breathe in and think: ‘Those are the kids who buy music, the kids who will have their own kids and take them to shows, so I’ll still be getting Broadway roles when I’m 50.’ ” Then, a little forlornly, she adds: “I would love to be included in one of those Stephen Sondheim concerts at the Kennedy Center, but I never get invited.”

As a child, Menzel dreamt of Broadway success, urging her mother to let her audition for Annie, but Mrs Menzel was having none of it.

“She always reminded me,” the singer recalls, “about this little five-year-old girl who got pulled off the summer-camp bus to go to an audition for a commercial. She was crying, but her mom still made her go.” Menzel’s parents divorced when she was 15, and, in order to bring some money into the home, she got a job as a wedding singer, working the bar-mitzvah and marriage circuit. It was here, she says, that she learnt her craft, odd though she knows that sounds.

Until that point, she’d been receiving a classical training. From then on, technique gave way to spontaneity: it was Whitney Houston, Madonna and Aretha Franklin all the way. “Someone requests a song,” she says, “you hardly know it, you’re on the spot, the lyrics are taped to the microphone, and off you go. You’re winging it. But people aren’t really listening, so you can sort of try your own thing.” In the tour she has just done across America, Menzel included what she calls her “20-minute shtick” about the period.

“I take everyone back to me as a wedding singer in 1989, so out come the polyester shoulder pads and all that stuff. I go back to when I’m singing I Just Called to Say I Love You and this man has a heart attack on the dancefloor, so I try to stop singing and my boss yells, ‘The band always plays on.’ Or the first dances: you’re singing Saving All My Love for You for the newlyweds, and it’s a song about a guy cheating on his wife.”

While she was studying at NYU, Menzel sang in a succession of downtown rock bands, but theatre — with its “in-built family”, which the self-confessedly insular singer was drawn to — kept tempting her back. And Rent — which even, and perhaps especially, those involved imagined might be a minor success, if it took off at all — soon changed everything. It was during the run that Menzel met her husband, the black American television actor Taye Diggs, who was also in the cast. As their celebrity grew, their mixed-race relationship led to their receiving a succession of threatening letters, and the police became involved.

“We were in the cocoon of the theatre community — black, white, gay, straight — so we didn’t feel any animosity,” she says. “The hate mail thing got blown out of proportion, but it was a little scary, especially for other people. We weren’t scared because we had these huge bodyguards, like we were Justin and Britney: going out the back way, decoy cars. It was crazy.”

These days, the couple live in Los Angeles with a terrier named Sammy Davis Jr and their two so-called “jazz cats”, Ella and Coltrane. Her husband, Menzel says, “is very much glass half-full, he’s always believed that he was going to do something important with his life, not in a conceited way, just that his self-esteem is better”. Her self-confidence is, she says, more delicate. “I’m learning that when someone says, ‘I thought you did a beautiful interpretation of that song tonight,’ take it, and say thank you.”

Gorgeous, the best track on her new album, features the line “As long as we crash and we collide”. That’s pretty violent for a love song, I suggest. “Yes,” Menzel says, “but it’s romantic and tumultuous, too. That’s the way I want to lead my life. I want things to be messy, to be alive and risky.”

Risky is one word to describe her decision once again to dip her toes in the chart-pop waters. A few years ago, an interviewer described Menzel as “both shy and a show-off”. “Show-off is a little harsh,” the singer says. “I was the kid who, in the car on the way to the beach in the summer, if a song came on the radio, was the only one not singing. I didn’t want all my friends to feel that I was trying to upstage them. You’re always so afraid of standing out when you’re young.” And suddenly you understand what she means about a gift and a curse.

I Stand and the single Brave are both released on Warner Bros on September 22

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