Tony winner an ingenue no longer
When Kelli O’Hara took home her first Tony Award last year for her performance as Anna in “The King and I,” she felt “truly and honestly, legitimately surprised.”
“I had really succumbed to the fact that I wasn’t going to” win, says O’Hara, who had been nominated five previous times, over the phone from New York. This time, she hadn’t received a Drama Desk nomination, so for the Tonys, she didn’t plan a speech.
When she took the stage to accept her award, one of the most stirring things she said off the cuff was addressed to her parents: “You don’t have to pretend it’s OK this time.”
Reflecting on the win more than a year later, O’Hara says, “I think it’s different for a person who’s coming right out of the gate, and everything kind of explodes after that. For me, it was more the way it settled down, and the stream became calm — and now I’ll go on and work.”
Part of the work O’Hara will go on to do includes her West Coast concert debut, at Bay Area Cabaret’s season opening gala on Friday, Sept. 23, in the Venetian Room of the Fairmont. The set list will include a song or two from each of her shows, which include “South Pacific,” “The Light in the Piazza,” “The Pajama Game,” “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” in addition to “The King and I.”
She’ll perform songs she’s excited to revisit, as well as, she says, “things that I would never get asked to sing” and some original pieces, using arrangements that have “a little bit of earthiness, a little bit of country,” to make the songs feel more personal. (O’Hara is originally from Oklahoma.)
Among all her roles over the years, a particularly transformative one to play was Francesca Johnson, a disaffected married woman who has an affair in “The Bridges of Madison County.” As a soprano, O’Hara has been relegated to ingenue roles for much of her career. Giving an acceptance speech at the 2014 Lilly Awards, which honor women in American theater, she said of her performance of Francesca, “I didn’t know what it felt like to say the words of a woman until this year.”
Playing Francesca, O’Hara says two years later, “I felt a settling back. I’m not talking about being complacent. I feel like I dropped into something more than I ever had in my life, as opposed to trying to reach for something that was unattainable. I remember so many years of playing an ingenue and the director wanting me to be, just be, just exude light and innocence and lack of mystery, lack of question. And that is so hard for a young woman.”
Francesca, unlike an ingenue, was an older woman “who had missed some of the opportunities in life,” O’Hara says. “It’s a realistic person. It wasn’t necessarily me, but it was someone I knew, someone we all knew.”
O’Hara’s Tony-winning performance as Anna, a British schoolteacher hired by the king of Siam as a governess, was in the same vein. For that, she credits dramatist and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote “The King and I” with composer Richard Rodgers.
“This is where I have to really pat Oscar Hammerstein on the back, and I will do that over and over again,” she says. “The kind of women he was writing — even his ingenues were complicated.”
Of Hammerstein’s creation of Anna, O’Hara says, “He wrote a whole woman. I don’t know how. I looked for things to be harder. I looked for challenges in Anna, to give her more than was on the page. ‘Where can I make her complicated or more layered?’ Honestly, I didn’t need to work that hard. When I realized that, it was a beautiful feeling. He really wrote a woman who had become strong out of certain complications in her own life.”
O’Hara doesn’t necessarily see a career of playing strong but complicated women ahead of her, though. “I look around, and I sometimes don’t see the roles being written. I love the vulnerabilities. I love the challenges. That’s what makes a character fun to play.
“What better characters are there than Mama Rose and Sally and Phyllis and all those women who represent something that’s painful?” she continues. “But there should also be the ones that are inspiring in a different way.”