Kelli O’Hara: Singing The Hours Opera Is “a Fearful Thing for Me to Do”
She’ll be appearing alongside divas Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato at the Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of a new opera based on Michael Cunningham’s novel.
Kelli O'Hara, the Broadway star, will appear in a new opera.
Photographer: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images North AmericaA brand-new opera based on Michael Cunningham’s bestselling novel The Hours will premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on Nov. 22. Composed by the Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts, the opera stars the divas Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, along with Kelli O’Hara, the Tony Award-winning Broadway star who’s also currently a star of HBO’s The Gilded Age. Audiences first heard the opera in concert form earlier this year in Philadelphia, where the New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe called it “direct, effective theater, with a cinematic quality in its plush, propulsive underscoring.”
The Hours, which was turned into a 2002 movie starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore, uses Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway as source material as it follows its three protagonists through their respective time periods. O’Hara will sing the role of Laura Brown, a midcentury housewife suffocated by the era’s restrictions.