The Luckiest Girl on Broadway
If South Pacific Star Kelli O'Hara Seems Like She's Living the Good Life, That's Because She Is
By Angelo Pitillo
Photographed by Laura Marie Duncan
Kelli O'Hara is one of Broadway's top leading ladies, with three Tony nominations under her belt for A Light in the Piazza, The Pajama Game, and Lincoln Center's long-running smash revival of South Pacific, which she recently returned to for the show's final weeks and a PBS filming. A celebrated concert vocalist, O'Hara has also sung at Carnegie Hall with the New York and Boston Philharmonic orchestras. Additionally, she a bright new light on the elite cabaret circuit, with an acclaimed show at the Carlyle last year and her debut at Feinstein's this week. She is blissfully wed to a husband, actor/singer/songwriter Greg Naughton, who, as the son of stage and screen legend James Naughton is himself second-generation Broadway royalty. And to top it off the couple has a bouncing baby boy they are raising at their rural hideaway in upstate NY. Yep, O'Hara seemingly has it all.
And yet, when we chatted by phone last week, O'Hara half-laughed and half-groaned when I told her this fairy-tale life of hers sounds too good to be true. "Oh no!" she exclaimed. "That's a horrible place to be, because then you're doomed to fail!" But I'm apparently not the only on who thinks O'Hara's life sounds picture-perfect. O'Hara admits that during her shows at the Carlyle, "Katie Couric and a bunch of her girlfriends came, and she was so sweet and so cute, and then she just said 'Sometimes I want to strangle you!'"
But despite O'Hara's worries that she might have it too good, she gave me plenty of evidence that she leads a charmed life - her son, Owen, sleeps well, we learn, and accompanies her on the concert outings for which her delicate lyric soprano vocal chops are in muchdemand. "It's a lovely thing to be able to do to just go and sing" she says. "So I feel very lucky to have that option." Her home life in between gigs sounds pretty idyllic too. "We literally sit around and sing. and it's so annoying" O'Hara says with a laugh. "It's a house full of music. If anyone was a fly on the wall in our house they would totally roll their eyes at us because we just sit around and sing in harmony and do-wop at dinner."
It's not that O'Hara hasn't paid her dues. Her last three Broadway outings may have been Tony-nominated triumphs, but before that she did time in a number of stinkers, she reminds us. "Oh my god, are you kidding me? I was the flop girl until Light in the Piazza. came around" she laughs. "I did Dracula [the short-lived, un-lamented Frank Wildhorn musical] for God's sake! And I was in Jekyll and Hyde, which wasn't actually a flop, but I was in it when it was closing, and it was David Hasselhoff and Sebastian Bach, and the whole company was unraveling quickly, and it just felt like it wasn't a show with a lot of life left in it."
Those days are certainly long gone, and O'Hara now finds herself in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose when it comes to new projects, which she admits is a bit of a challenge coming off the critical and commercial double-whammy of South Pacific. "I think it would be important to look for something really different, so that it would be fulfilling in a way that South Pacific wasn't" she says. "So even if it's not a huge success at least it's a fulfilling challenge as far as creativity goes." Wherever she goes next, O'Hara tells us, her priority will be balancing her professional and personal life, which in a sense, we learn, is the theme of her Feinstein's show. "Really the show is based on something that Stephen Sondheim said in his show Sondheim on Sondheim. He said that he'd never did his own librettos because he wanted to have a family when he wrote a show, and if he did everything himself he wouldn't get that. I loved that because my life right now is the balance between my family in shows and the world of my business and then my own family that I'm creating."
And the key to striking that balance, O'Hara believes, is to try to stay in the moment. "If you don't just catch it now it's gone" she says. "Meaning my career, my child growing so fast, the families that you make, especially in this business -- everything about life is fleeting. So the answers to all these questions is just to soak in what's right in front of you right now." She pauses before letting out a light trill of laughter, adding: "And hopefully I won't get too grand about the subject -- There will be some humor in there too. I don't want to get too schmaltzy!"
Kelli O'Hara, Feinstein's at Loews Regency, 3540 Park Ave., (212) 339-4095. Feinsteinsatloewsregency.com Through Oct 30. Tue.-Thurs., 8:30 p.m.; Fri. & Sat., 8:00 & 10:30 p.m.
And yet, when we chatted by phone last week, O'Hara half-laughed and half-groaned when I told her this fairy-tale life of hers sounds too good to be true. "Oh no!" she exclaimed. "That's a horrible place to be, because then you're doomed to fail!" But I'm apparently not the only on who thinks O'Hara's life sounds picture-perfect. O'Hara admits that during her shows at the Carlyle, "Katie Couric and a bunch of her girlfriends came, and she was so sweet and so cute, and then she just said 'Sometimes I want to strangle you!'"
But despite O'Hara's worries that she might have it too good, she gave me plenty of evidence that she leads a charmed life - her son, Owen, sleeps well, we learn, and accompanies her on the concert outings for which her delicate lyric soprano vocal chops are in muchdemand. "It's a lovely thing to be able to do to just go and sing" she says. "So I feel very lucky to have that option." Her home life in between gigs sounds pretty idyllic too. "We literally sit around and sing. and it's so annoying" O'Hara says with a laugh. "It's a house full of music. If anyone was a fly on the wall in our house they would totally roll their eyes at us because we just sit around and sing in harmony and do-wop at dinner."
It's not that O'Hara hasn't paid her dues. Her last three Broadway outings may have been Tony-nominated triumphs, but before that she did time in a number of stinkers, she reminds us. "Oh my god, are you kidding me? I was the flop girl until Light in the Piazza. came around" she laughs. "I did Dracula [the short-lived, un-lamented Frank Wildhorn musical] for God's sake! And I was in Jekyll and Hyde, which wasn't actually a flop, but I was in it when it was closing, and it was David Hasselhoff and Sebastian Bach, and the whole company was unraveling quickly, and it just felt like it wasn't a show with a lot of life left in it."
Those days are certainly long gone, and O'Hara now finds herself in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose when it comes to new projects, which she admits is a bit of a challenge coming off the critical and commercial double-whammy of South Pacific. "I think it would be important to look for something really different, so that it would be fulfilling in a way that South Pacific wasn't" she says. "So even if it's not a huge success at least it's a fulfilling challenge as far as creativity goes." Wherever she goes next, O'Hara tells us, her priority will be balancing her professional and personal life, which in a sense, we learn, is the theme of her Feinstein's show. "Really the show is based on something that Stephen Sondheim said in his show Sondheim on Sondheim. He said that he'd never did his own librettos because he wanted to have a family when he wrote a show, and if he did everything himself he wouldn't get that. I loved that because my life right now is the balance between my family in shows and the world of my business and then my own family that I'm creating."
And the key to striking that balance, O'Hara believes, is to try to stay in the moment. "If you don't just catch it now it's gone" she says. "Meaning my career, my child growing so fast, the families that you make, especially in this business -- everything about life is fleeting. So the answers to all these questions is just to soak in what's right in front of you right now." She pauses before letting out a light trill of laughter, adding: "And hopefully I won't get too grand about the subject -- There will be some humor in there too. I don't want to get too schmaltzy!"
Kelli O'Hara, Feinstein's at Loews Regency, 3540 Park Ave., (212) 339-4095. Feinsteinsatloewsregency.com Through Oct 30. Tue.-Thurs., 8:30 p.m.; Fri. & Sat., 8:00 & 10:30 p.m.
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