Kelli O'Hara rings in 2015 merrily, with Met debut

NEW YORK — In 2014, Broadway star Kelli O'Hara earned her fifth Tony Award nomination playing a woman torn between responsibility and passion in the musical The Bridges of Madison County. She'll ring out the year in a role that's decidedly lighter in tone.

On Wednesday night, New Year's Eve, O'Hara will make her Metropolitan Opera debut in the premiere of a new production of Franz Lehár's 1905 comic operetta The Merry Widow. Directed and choreographed by another Broadway veteran, Susan Stroman, the staging features Renée Fleming in the title role, a woman who has traveled from Pontevedro (a stand-in for Montenegro) to Paris with an envoy that hopes to secure her a match to keep her late husband's wealth in their country. O'Hara plays Valencienne, the ambassador's young wife, who attracts another man's attention in the meantime.

Performing at the Met has "been a goal and a dream of mine for years," says O'Hara, chatting in her dressing room at Lincoln Center during a rehearsal break. The actress, 38, received her bachelor's degree in music from Oklahoma City University, focusing on opera, and several of her musical-theater performances, including those in Bridges and 2005's The Light in the Piazza, have showcased the classical prowess of her warm, bright soprano.

O'Hara is respectful of the differences between the forms. "I understand very well why it's not eight shows a week" at the Met, she says. For starters, performers in contemporary Broadway musicals have the luxury of being miked. "That doesn't have to be a crutch," but in opera "your voice does need to have as much power as it can on the stage and you have to be as present as you can."

She also credits Stroman, one of a number of leading theater directors recruited at the Met under general manager Peter Gelb, with making the transition to the Met's grand stage seem natural for her.

"The rehearsal room feels very familiar," she says. "What Susan is doing that is so magical here at the Met is she is using every single person as an individual. ... She's taking every single person and saying, 'What do you do best?' and, 'Let me see some of that.'

"So every dancer has a trick, and every chorus member is waltzing. There's movement; there's a different story going on in every corner of the stage. So we all feel like our time is being spent wisely and not wasted, and we're just having a blast."

Widow wraps its run Jan. 31, but O'Hara won't be away from Lincoln Center for long. On March 12, she begins performances there in a new Broadway revival of The King and I, helmed by Bartlett Sher, who directed her in Bridges and in Lincoln Center Theater's acclaimed 2008 revival of another Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, South Pacific.

"I think it's going to be grand and wonderful and hopefully what everyone wants it to be," O'Hara says of King. "We're going to go inside it and find every detail and every aspect of it that needs to be told in this particular time." She'll play another "strong woman," she notes — one who has to face certain struggles.

For now, though, her focus is on making Merry into the new year. "It's so celebratory," she says. "I think it's a perfect fit for this occasion."