Nothing escapes Kelli O’Hara. When she sings “To Build a Home” from The Bridges of Madison County, memory rolls across her eyes; each note becomes a tree, a station, a life. You hear landscapes in her voice. Therein audiences have found refuge: In her emotion and presence, they’ve seen their own stories reflected back. And within the warmth of each song, role, and city that has touched her, it is clear that she, too, has built herself a home.
O’Hara may hail from Oklahoma, born to an Irish American family, but with her solo show this Friday and Saturday (April 18-19) at Steppenwolf Theatre Company with music director Dan Lipton, she’s experiencing a homecoming of sorts, as some of her earliest gigs were in Chicago. In fact, she first met Lipton when she was appearing in The Light in the Piazza at Goodman Theatre. In addition to her solo show this week, she’s thrilled to return in a few months for a duo show with Sutton Foster inspired by the 1960s TV specials of Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews, kicking off at the Ravinia on July 13 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
She called me from a car ride with her family as they drank in the rolling prairies and vast skies of Oklahoma, and it was impossible not to think of Francesca from Bridges, a role she originated on Broadway now over a decade ago. As I anticipate this weekend’s performance, I wonder what songs she may have to omit for time. There are so many she is known for—too many for one evening. Her life in roles proves striking range and depth: There’s Clara in The Light in the Piazza, Nellie in South Pacific, Anna in The King and I, Kate/Lilli in Kiss Me, Kate, most recently Kirsten in Days of Wine and Roses, and…
Well, you get the picture: Despite a high-profile turn on the TV show The Gilded Age, O’Hara remains an evergreen fixture of the stage. And she doesn’t take her career for granted, citing the line, “She grabs a box of safety pins, and builds herself a home,” as a way to honor the people who made sacrifices for her journey and career.
Our conversation unraveled the intertwined personal and artistic threads that have led her up to this point. It has been edited for length and clarity.
GABRIELA FURTADO COUTINHO: How are you? Are you excited to be coming back to Chicago? What are you most looking forward to about performing on Steppenwolf’s stage?
KELLI O’HARA: First of all, I’m completely honored to be on the Steppenwolf stage. I’ve been a huge, dreamy admirer of that company for years and years. Some of my earliest professional beginnings were in Chicago. It was one of the starting points for The Light in the Piazza. My first national tour (Jekyll & Hyde) went through Chicago, and we stayed for a while. I was there for Sweet Smell of Success, which we opened there. I have some personal stories that happened there. I was there this past fall for the Sarah Siddons Society (award benefit). I just love Chicago. I’m bringing my whole family this time. It’s my kids’ spring break, so we’re all making a trip of it. And I’m looking forward to telling my own personal story through song and story in Chicago, where I’ve only played roles before.
I’m excited that this will be an evening of song and story interwoven. Is there one in particular that you can tease, that may surprise the audience?
Let me think of one I want to give away! I do want to tell one of my favorite stories about Marvin Hamlisch, because of Sweet Smell of Success, the first brand-new show I ever did for Broadway. We started it in Chicago, and he was such an important person and mentor in my life. He wrote the music for that show, and I’m going to tell a story about him and sing a song that was cut from Sweet Smell of Success. We did it in Chicago, but it never made it to Broadway. He never wanted to cut it either. I’ll never forget the phone call he had to make that the cut was just for time, and the song didn’t further the plot. We both mourned it, and we would sing it together for years after the show closed.
I can only imagine the tough cuts you’ve had to witness over the years since you’ve done so many new musicals.
Oh yeah, you have to be good at killing your babies. You have to let go of things if it’s not furthering the plot. But as a performer, you can’t help ask yourself, “Is it my fault? Did I do something wrong?” He was so kind at the time, to call and reassure me that it had nothing to do with me. And then he told me a story about how even Ethel Merman got a song cut once, and I remember taking solace in that.
That is comforting! It must be so interesting to revisit songs from roles you played that may not have been in the original Broadway productions, or perhaps feel different because you’re in a different phase of life. Is there a role that feels especially different to you today compared to when you first performed it?
My first instinct to answer that question is Clara from Light in the Piazza. These days, I sing Margaret songs more often; I sing “Fable.” But when we did the show in Chicago, I was playing Franca, the Italian sister-in-law.
Is there another role you wish you could return to, or that you couldn’t quite squeeze into the set list this weekend?
That’s a good question! What have I left out? There are definitely shows I have to leave out; when you think of a 75-minute program, it ends up being 15 or 16 songs, and there have been 12 Broadway shows, but sometimes I want to sing a couple from one. Come to think of it, I don’t have any Gershwin in my program this time, so I apologize to all the Gershwin lovers! I didn’t fit one from Nice Work If You Can Get It this time. I think it’s because some of the others I’ve chosen, I just want them to also go with the stories I tell, to make the show more personal.
You’ve spoken in the past about being Irish American and singing “To Build a Home” with your grandmother at the back of your mind. I could hear the level of specificity in each word and see my own immigrant experience reflected in the story behind each note. Can you talk a bit about your connection to The Bridges of Madison County and what it’s been like to share the story with your family and audience members, especially when people crave that kind of emotionally invested representation?
I love to hear that; thank you so much. I wanted to respect the idea of family and origin and roots. It’s so funny, because I’m driving through western Oklahoma, where I grew up and where that grandma you mentioned was raised. I’m sitting with my parents, and my dad’s driving, and we’ve been talking about my family and where they come from. I’ve been taking my kids around where I grew up. That particular song that Jason wrote for the show—even though I can’t say it was 100 percent on purpose—fits into my personal story and how I grew up in this town. The acreage of farm. There’s a son and a daughter. The song mentions Osceola station. After the show, I learned that Osceola was where my family came and landed. If that’s not a connection or something spiritual, I don’t know what is; Jason had no way of knowing. Whatever you believe, that connection is so strong. Whenever I sing that song, from those details and how I got the opportunities I’ve had and who sacrificed for them, it makes me think of my home and how I got here. It’s a song that’s incredibly personal to me. It sounds like my theme song.
That’s beautiful to hear. I imagine it’s happened to you a lot over the years, that audience members come up to you and share a part of their lives because of the way you made them feel seen. Is there a particular moment or story you recall like that?
That is one of the most important parts of what I do. I think of it very much as a purpose, as a service. I was taught to sing. We didn’t have a lot of audiences in western Oklahoma unless it was a church or someone’s wedding or funeral. It was more about service, so that’s how I’ve always thought about it. You want the stories you tell, the characters you play, to be something that someone can identify with or see themselves through. A lyric in that song that really moves people, especially women, is, “She grabbed a box of safety pins and builds herself a home.” I often think about someone like my grandmother or her mother before her, having very little, taking care of a whole family, and giving the next generation more chances. That’s so important to me. Then to have someone come up and say, “This reminded me of where I came from and I don’t want to forget the sacrifices that were made.” It has happened several times, people saying, “I had a horrible health scare,” or “I had brain surgery,” or “I had an MRI, and I was incredibly scared, so I had them put on The Bridges of Madison County or The Light in the Piazza.” “I got through those treatments” or “got through those tests with that music in my ear.” When I hear that, I think to myself, That’s the reason to do this.
Absolutely. And you infuse such palpable care and intention into each beat. I’m curious about what your process is around emotional, dramaturgical research for each character. I know you’re someone who takes source material seriously.
I do. I was just having a conversation with somebody about this. It’s our job. Part of the craft is to research everything, from the time period to the circumstances of this individual character. What kind of humanity have they been raised with, where do they live, what is happening politically in their time, what’s happening in the family? And this is what I feel. I don’t know anyone else’s particular journey or their process, but I feel that, once I educate myself, I have to find what I call the nugget, the nugget that makes me understand. The best example I can give is Anna in The King and I. I wasn’t a British, Indian-born schoolteacher who traveled to modern-day Thailand with my son to teach children within a kingdom that allowed no one else in. I don’t understand that necessarily—but I did know what it’s like to be the mother of a son who is protective of that child and wants to give him a life and support him. There’s a scene in the beginning of the show where I fight with the king, “I want my house? Where is my house?” And trying to get inside her anger and passion in that moment, the only thing I could do was to consider, “I want the protection for my son. Where is the protection for my son?” When you find that nugget, that human connection, the rest of the role—as long as you’ve researched what you’re doing—falls into place. Because you immediately make them a human being.
What’s impressive about your work is you’re able to live in those imaginary circumstances and emotionally let go—while keeping incredible control over your voice. That’s a difficult balancing act: to maintain control while letting go and living in the illusion of the first time, to portray a breathless character yet with breath support as a singer. That likely comes with years of practice, but is there a piece of advice or pre-show ritual you can share that prepares you to do that?
Thank you for that. I think what I’ve learned is that anybody who wants to do better and continually learn for the rest of their lives always assumes they get it wrong. That’s me—I’m always assuming I’m not going far enough. I’m one of those people who would much rather hear a person crack and fall apart, as long as they meant it. It’s real. I’ve watched Audra McDonald completely rip herself apart onstage, and I’ve admired that so much. I’ve been called subtle, and I’ve often wondered if I’m holding back. I never feel like I am. But I think the older I get, the freer I get, because I realize it isn’t just about perfection. It isn’t about getting the note just right or the mark just right; it’s actually just about being free.
So my preparation as I’ve gotten older has had much less to do with warming the voice and worrying about technical aspects of my performance and much more to do with freeing my body, stretching, doing yoga, becoming still, becoming open, getting loose. Whatever happens, I let it go through me. That’s been a great gift to me. When I was younger—I think this is true of most of us—we try to control it more than it wants to be. It actually wants to be risky and messy.
Thank you for that. I feel I could really see you letting go, especially in a song like “Almost Real.” It’s incredibly emotional. From what I saw in videos, your most recent performance on Broadway in Days of Wine and Roses felt very physically loose and honest. Is there a particular note or piece of advice that has helped you most across your career?
That’s a great question. I think the older I get, the more I learn about breath and breath work—even in life, what breath does for us and how it heals us, how it calms us, how it makes us crazy if we don’t use it right. A little secret from Days of Wine and Roses for me was this incredible lyric where she says all her breath comes out in one big bubble. If you can think about your body at the end of its breath, not at the beginning, you can imagine how out of control that feels. Not at the beginning of choice, but at the end of choice. That was a journey and exercise of being out of breath. Onstage, we always think about having plenty of breath to sing, having to take big breaths; everything should be supported by the breath. But if you actually attack a role like Kirsten in Days of Wine and Roses with no breath, the work is almost done for you. It changes who you are altogether.
You’ve been keen on understanding and respecting communities represented onstage long before questions about identity-based roles in commercial theatre really kicked into high gear in recent years. For instance, you’ve talked about feeling weight portraying Clara in The Light in the Piazza. That was the first disabled character I ever saw in an American musical. I’m curious about how you’ve seen conversations in the rehearsal room shift around representation and authenticity across your career.
Things are changing but feel slow. When something has been done one way for so long, it feels like the most natural and obvious choice. To have someone in the room who actually has knowledge of the subject matter you’re exploring, who actually has direct connection, that is still sometimes a fight. For instance, in playing a female character, if you’re the only female in the room to speak for her, that’s a hard place to be; there will be disagreements, because the other people in the room don’t embody or live inside that mind. When we were doing The Light in the Piazza, and I did not have the disability or blunt trauma head injury that Clara had, we did not have someone there to speak for Clara. So what I needed to do was read every single thing I could, to try to bring some of the realistic human being to that character. At the end of the day, so much of what I found was cut or lessened. We had notes from Sondheim on that and tried different things.
What we need more and more of is authenticity in telling those stories, having the people in the room who can tell them truthfully and honestly. For an actor whose job it is to portray a story, not to turn for advice or education seems to me irresponsible. As we go forward and that starts to happen more, I look for it to be happening without question. I needed help. I wanted more help and information from every corner. I do think we are making and building rooms that are more open to that. There’s still a ways to go.
Making people happy and spreading joy is also a passion you’ve discussed. That feels especially important at this moment. You recently participated in a benefit concert for the Trevor Project which highlighted the musical Finn and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, both of which were canceled at the Kennedy Center. I’m interested in what kind of work and art is speaking to you at this critical moment, both in terms of inspiration and the shows you want to take on.
Absolutely. This is our job, isn’t it? It’s our job as artists to make sense of the world around us. We are the lucky ones, because rather than denying the realities, we actually should go toward them, dig them, and highlight them. The other job is to go deeply into the center of fear, problems, misinformation, or lack of education, and explode that information out. To make it accessible, to highlight it so you can’t make blanket decisions about people or things when you don’t know who they are or you haven’t educated yourself on them. I want to be a part of that, shining a light on all of that.
Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (she/ela/ella) is the digital editor of American Theatre.
