Renée Fleming & Kelli O'Hara Set for New Opera Based on The Hours

Tony nominee Renée Fleming and Tony winner Kelli O'Hara will star in an opera based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours. Composed by Kevin Puts, who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his debut opera Silent Night, the piece is aiming to bow at the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2022, according to an interview with Fleming in The New York Times.

Fleming will play the role of Clarissa, which Meryl Streep portrayed in the 2002 Oscar-nominated film based on the book. O'Hara will play Laura (Julianne Moore in the film), and Grammy and Olivier winner Joyce DiDonato is set to play Virginia Woolf, the role for which Nicole Kidman won an Academy Award in the movie version.

An internationally acclaimed soprano and four-time Grammy winner, Fleming made her Broadway debut in 2015 in Living on Love; her performance in the 2018 revival of Carousel earned her a Tony nomination. O'Hara garnered a Tony Award for the 2015 revival of The King and I and six additional Tony nominations for performances in The Light in the Piazza, The Pajama Game, South Pacific, Nice Work If You Can Get It, The Bridges of Madison County and Kiss Me, Kate. She made her Met debut in the 2014-15 season with the company’s production of The Merry Widow and returned for the 2017-2018 season in Mozart’s Così fan tutte. DiDonato won the 2018 Olivier Award for Achievement in Opera for Semiramide.

Additional casting and exact dates will be announced later.