\n<\/p>\n
On the HBO costume drama \u201cThe Gilded Age<\/a>,\u201d Kelli O\u2019Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard\u2019s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.<\/p>\n When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.<\/p>\n O\u2019Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of \u201cThe Hours,\u201d<\/a> starring opposite Ren\u00e9e Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.<\/p>\n Still, the Met\u2019s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O\u2019Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O\u2019Hara does.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cOnce I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O\u2019Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing \u201cThe Hours,\u201d<\/a> Kevin Puts\u2019s adaptation of Michael Cunningham\u2019s time-skipping novel,<\/a> itself inspired by Virginia Woolf\u2019s \u201cMrs. Dalloway,\u201d which opens May 5.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One of the Met\u2019s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O\u2019Hara a few items from the Met\u2019s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like a rock concert,\u201d O\u2019Hara marveled. \u201cThe passion people had.\u201d<\/p>\n Opera was not quite O\u2019Hara\u2019s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn\u2019t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met\u2019s National Council Auditions<\/a> and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d and \u201cThe King and I,\u201d for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for \u201cDays of Wine and Roses.\u201d<\/p>\n While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met\u2019s stage. \u201cThere was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta \u201cThe Merry Widow\u201d directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart\u2019s \u201cCos\u00ec Fan Tutte\u201d in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O\u2019Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn\u2019t mind a certain amount of fright.<\/p>\n \u201cI had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,\u201d she said. \u201c\u2019You can do this. You\u2019re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That work paid off. When she sang in \u201cCos\u00ec,\u201d her \u201clovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction<\/a>\u201d were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That\u2019s rarer still.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Hours,\u201d O\u2019Hara\u2019s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O\u2019Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O\u2019Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel\u2019s \u201cDays of Wine and Roses.\u201d<\/a> Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,\u201d O\u2019Hara said.<\/p>\n For O\u2019Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It\u2019s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she\u2019ll keep pursuing it \u2014 for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)<\/p>\n O\u2019Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met\u2019s opening. And O\u2019Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m confident enough to want to try,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n