By SHARON EBERSON
Kelli O’Hara’s voice emanated from the phone Thursday morning, talking about Shirley Jones.
Musical royalty gushing about royalty. Sublime.
There’ll be more of that at SHIRLEY JONES: A Gala Celebration of her Life, Career, and Legacy, Saturday, September 21, 2024, at the Byham Theater. The event honoring the Pittsburgh native and legendary soprano at 90 will feature a concert of Broadway stars singing songs from her 60-year career.
The stage will be graced by Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis and Adam Pascal, and Tony Award winners Jessie Mueller and O’Hara.
We start the conversation at the beginning, talking about Ms. Jones’ influence on a smalltown girl, growing up in western Oklahoma, without access to live theater – you may have already guessed what comes next.
It was “pretty monumental,” O’Hara says.
“The first thing I ever saw was the film of Oklahoma!,” which was the first of three beloved movie musicals starring Ms. Jones. “It was the first time I ever saw someone singing [in a movie], and it was a farm girl with blonde hair on the porch in a farmhouse, and I believe, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, I probably said, ‘Well, that’s who I’m going to be.’ And then I continued to dream that way.”
The musical also was the first live production she experienced, at age 4, at Discoveryland Ranch in Sand Springs, Oklahoma.
“So I looked at this girl, Laurey, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s going to be me.’ And then of course, well, that’s the same woman that’s in Carousel and there she’s again in The Music Man, and between Shirley Jones and Julie Andrews, I think I had my path.”
That path would come full circle, in a short run of The Music Man in California, when O’Hara played Marian the Librarian, and Ms. Jones played her mother, Mrs. Paroo.
“Just even saying it makes me almost teary-eyed, when that came through,” O’Hara says of working with a childhood hero.
“It was a very short production and we were out there by ourselves, sort of, and we had the occasion to have dinner together,” O’Hara recalls. “I tried to pretend I was cool and that we were peers, but inside I was just gleeful.”
At the time, she was hoping for a second pregnancy, and the conversation turned to how Ms. Jones was pregnant with Patrick Cassidy – the director and cohost of the gala – during filming of The Music Man.
“Nobody knew – she didn’t want to lose her job. Those were the days! And here I was thinking … and this is so meta – I might be pregnant right now, but nobody knows. And she was when she was playing Marian! And so I talked to her about that, and about the business, and how it’s been tough to be a woman and not to lose your job because you might be pregnant. And of course now I have been through that twice, where I either cut shows short or did cartwheels until I was six months pregnant, in a bikini. And so it was a wonderful thing to have that sort of mentorship. I was my mid 30s then, and she couldn’t have been more lovely.
“And I of course,” O’Hara adds, “I had worked with Patrick before that, and so I knew the product of that story.”
When Cassidy called to ask her to be part of Saturday’s tribute to his mother, the only hesitancy was scheduling. O’Hara is currently on a concert tour, and the gala has been rescheduled several times, before settling on the September 21 date.
Her own recent stage roles included Broadway’s Days of Wine and Roses – her eighth Tony nomination – and her latest appearance at The Metropolitan Opera, joining fellow sopranos Renee Fleming and Joyce DiDonato.
In a New York Times interview, she had said of making the move from Broadway to the preeminent national opera company, “Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing.”
What might seem like an obvious match from afar isn’t always so obvious.
“I do want to continually push myself and scare myself a little bit, because when I do that and I don’t completely fall on my face, I teach myself something. It allows me to keep going forward and to keep stretching,” O’Hara says. “I’m not one of those people who can just do the same thing over and over and over again. In fact, to me it feels like things are vastly different each time. It might not seem like that to the beholder, but I think that that’s what being an artist is, is this constant evolution and malleability and especially vocally. And in my particular case, that’s not going to go toward pop.”
It all comes back to that classically-trained lyric soprano – O’Hara and Kristen Chenoweth both studied with Oklahoma City University vocal teacher Florence Birdwell – and Broadway scores.
“It’s an interesting thing because obviously the musical theater genre has changed, and it’s become very poppy, and boy, do I wish I could do it. I mean, I spent part of my childhood trying to sing Whitney Houston, but that was just not to be,” O’Hara says. “But the more I sang Rodgers and Hammerstein [South Pacific and The King and I on Broadway] or things like that, this is how my musculature is built. And so continuing to find resources and examples of that singing, especially with Shirley, I thought, well, at least there’s a place for me.”
for The King and I in 2015. (Image: George Hoover)
Once she settled on what her range and style of singing was meant to be, she was a go-to choice for revivals, and then the modern composers writing scores “that match that feeling,” such as Jason Robert Brown’s Bridges of Madison County, Adam Guettel’s Light in the Piazza and Days of Wine and Roses, and Ricky Ian Gordon’s My Life with Albertine.
“I’ve made my career sort of because I had to do what I can do and not fight so much against what I can’t,” O’Hara says.
She has followed in Ms. Jones’ footsteps in another way, as a television actress, most recently in The Gilded Age, the HBO period drama jam-packed with Broadway stars. The third season of The Gilded Age is expected to return in 2025, but there is no specific release date yet.
“We’re having a good time with this season,” O’Hara says. “I have a couple more months of my shooting and we’ll wrap up in early January, and then we’ll see when they release it last time. They held it for a long time, but hopefully it’ll be sooner this time.”
In the meantime, she is fitting the gala performance amid a steady stream of concert dates. The stars of Broadway will share the Byham Theater stage with aspiring performers from the CLO Academy.
Just as Kelli O’Hara stands on the shoulders of Shirley Jones, those youngsters may be looking to her for inspiration and words of wisdom.
“Who you are right now is your only currency,” O’Hara tells the young people she meets, stopping in schools and training programs as she tours the country. “What makes you different is what makes you strong. In other words, the other people are already taken.”
Working with fellow performers such as Shirley Jones, she learned how impactful it can be to provide that kind of encouragement and enthusiasm to the next generation.
“I think one of the really beautiful things about my journey is that I have continually not been disappointed with my heroes,” O’Hara says, having worked with some “amazing kind of mentor women,” such as Victoria Clark, Marin Mazzie, Rebecca Luker and Shirley Jones,
Noting the latter’s down-to-earth attitude and generosity, O’Hara says of their time working together, “ I think she knew her example in my life, and knew exactly what I needed in that moment. You know what I think that comes from? It felt very like ‘a good mom.’ She knew that she was taking care of me at that moment.
“Some people know the responsibility they have when they have power,” she continues, “and that’s a real example of someone who used it in such a positive way, to encourage and inspire a younger actor who had looked up to her so much. I carry that, and it teaches me to go on and pass it forward.”
When O’Hara last appeared in concert in Pittsburgh, for the Trust Cabaret in 2017, tickets were in such high demand, it had to be moved from the Greer Cabaret and landed in the higher-seating-capacity August Wilson African American Cultural Center.
In the post-pandemic world, where the live performing arts continue to suffer in many ways, she sees hopeful signs as she travels around the country.
“It’s not so much about what devastation did take place. It’s about what stood, and the resiliency of people who love and need the arts,” O’Hara says. “I see this time and time again … We really need it, and people fought for it. And so I’ll go around to these companies where they hung on by a string and slowly but surely people were starving to come back out, and to be together and have this shared space, which we get less and less of these days unless it’s a sporting event.
“There’s nothing like sitting in a room and having a shared experience that’s in real time, and not manipulated or changed to set a certain ideal, but has mistakes and has reality and earthiness. I feel like we have to fight to keep that. And I will till I stop breathing. It’s everything to me.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
SHIRLEY JONES: A Gala Celebration of her Life, Career, and Legacy, a fundraiser for Pittsburgh CLO’s Education and Arts programs, is 4 p.m. September 21, 2024, at the Byham Theater, Downtown. Tickets are $105-$155 at https://www.pittsburghclo.org/shows/shirley-jones-a-gala-celebration-of-her-life-career-and-legacy .
Categories: Celebrity News, Company, Feature Stories, Our Posts, Show Previews
Leave a Reply Cancel reply