Tony Winner Kelli O'Hara Reveals What Being in Quarantine Has Taught Her About the World, and Herself
(Photo by Caitlin McNaney for Broadway.com; Graphic by Ryan Casey for Broadway.com)
Even Tony winners and Broadway legends have bills to pay. “I realized, I can’t make a living at all, unless I have people,” Tony-winning soprano Kelli O’Hara said on #LiveAtFive: Home Edition with Broadway.com's Paul Wontorek. “One thing I’m worried about is, how can I pay my bills? I’m trying to figure that out.” Like all of Broadway—and millions of workers in the entertainment industry who rely on audiences and the thrill of live performance to make a living—the coronavirus pandemic has robbed O’Hara of her livelihood. She had been set to join Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell in a Ragtime reunion concert this April, but it's been canceled. Musing on what to do for money, O'Hara joked, “I’m gonna start doing voice lessons or something virtual...for a million dollars! A million dollars!”
O’Hara, who is currently at home with her husband and two children, Owen and Charlotte, said the pandemic has been an awakening for her. “I think there's a great lesson in that: we're not in control,” she said. “We've never experienced the sort of thing where it says, ‘You stop your life.’” Earlier generations experienced the hard times and trauma of foreign wars, but “for us,” O’Hara said, “we had the real benefit of the war being over there. It’s no benefit to our country or anybody fighting, of course, but it kept us so naive and so innocent.” With coronavirus, O’Hara continued, “there’s a part of this that feels a like, ‘Wow, we’ve actually stopped what’s convenient to us.'”
With that reality in mind, last week, O’Hara chose to sing Stephen Sondheim’s ballad “Take Me to the World” on the one-night-only return of The Rosie O’Donnell show last week. “At the last minute, my music director, Dan Lipton, pulled it out,” explained O’Hara. The song, from Sondheim and James Goldman's musical, Evening Primrose, about a group of dwellers trapped inside a department store, forbidden to leave and fated to stare out the windows forever, seemed like a good well to draw from. “I hadn’t sung it in about 15 years, and Dan said, ‘Isn’t this the song?’” O'Hara said. A Sondheim deep cut if there ever was one, “Take Me to the World” is sung by “this young girl [who dreams] of all these things—to walk out under the clouds and the sun,” said O’Hara. The song is hitting a bit close to home now. “So every time you see me in the next year, I’ll probably be singing that song again."
Coronavirus aside, O’Hara said she knows a thing or two about falling in love with the idea of a new world: Like a lot of show folk, it’s a feeling she first experienced in high school drama club. “When I was 16, I moved towns. It was very hard for me,” she said. “My dad got a new job, and I moved to a brand new school. But the one thing that saved me there was this theater program.” Like a lot of school programs, the shows weren’t big-budget productions, but that didn’t matter. “We literally walked from mic to mic, singing the solo. We didn’t have like, lavaliers,” O’Hara laughed. “But the teacher—Dixie Lee Jordan, who’s now passed away—made it so real and true. And she really gave me the bite to love this world.” The soprano's time in high school drama was “probably the most important part of my life...Ultimately, it was when I felt like I would never be happy doing anything else again.”
Watch the rest of O’Hara’s #LiveAtFive: Home Edition interview below.
