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On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara performs a New York grande dame pressured to decide on sides in an opera warfare: stay on the previous guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being constructed by the nouveau riche that they had excluded.
When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the almost accomplished Met, the digital camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.
O’Hara herself is much extra acquainted with the Met, not less than in its present incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing on the Met for almost a decade, and is again now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring reverse Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends each.
Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 individuals, conjures up the identical marvel in O’Hara because it does in Aurora. Although Aurora by no means needed to fill it. And O’Hara does.
“Once I give over to it and imagine in myself, I do not forget that that is the way in which my voice needs to sing,” she mentioned.
This was on a current morning throughout a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand-held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would by no means.) Later she would return to the basement house the place she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself impressed by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.
One of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to point out O’Hara a number of objects from the Met’s founding that may have been acquainted to Aurora: a bit of its unique stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a field seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the viewers thronging the stage.
“It was like a rock live performance,” O’Hara marveled. “The ardour individuals had.”
Opera was not fairly O’Hara’s first ardour. She went to school intending to review musical theater, however was informed that her voice wasn’t constructed for the pop and rock kinds then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated within the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals on the regional degree. But she missed the camaraderie she had skilled in musical theater, so she packed her luggage and headed for Broadway.
Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of traditional musicals together with “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she received a Tony. Just this week she acquired her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”
While she didn’t remorse leaving opera, she generally puzzled how she may need fared on the Met’s stage. “There was at all times this factor behind my head that mentioned: But my voice needs to sing that approach,” she mentioned.
At the very finish of 2014, she had her likelihood, in a brand new manufacturing of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had beforehand labored on Broadway. She adopted that debut with a manufacturing of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was scary, however O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t thoughts a certain quantity of fright.
“I needed to put my spine straight and have conversations with myself,” she mentioned. “’You can do that. You’re advantageous. Just preserve your nostril to the bottom and do your work.’”
That work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “beautiful soprano voice and fairly good Italian diction” have been praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.
While opera singers often make the transfer to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are current examples), careers hardly ever move the opposite approach. And a performer who can do all this and tv, too? That’s rarer nonetheless.
“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first up to date opera, which premiered in 2022, is an extra problem. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a lady constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some methods, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the function O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is one other lady confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both discover freedom the place they’ll.
“I’m coming off of over two years now of taking part in unhappy ladies, held ladies, even Aurora, held again, constricted,” O’Hara mentioned.
For O’Hara, opera is just not precisely liberating. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll preserve pursuing it — for the problem, for the fear, for the vary of roles. (On TV, she mentioned, she now performs grandmothers. Opera is somewhat extra forgiving.)
O’Hara is aware of that she might fail. Her voice might crack. She would possibly flub a notice. But Aurora is courageous sufficient to hitch the new-money experts on the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her approach is courageous, too. Brave sufficient to ship her shiny, unamplified soprano out into 1000’s of ears every evening.
“I’m assured sufficient to need to attempt,” she mentioned.
