From receiving a BM in vocal performance to performing Clara in The Light in the Piazza, and from winning the state Metropolitan Opera council auditions to acting in Sex and the City 2, Kelli O’Hara has had nothing short of the performing career of a Renaissance woman.
O’Hara has acquired an understanding for what is expected of a singer and actress. She shares some of her experiences with Classical Singer.
Did you study any musical theatre as an undergraduate, or was your focus in classical singing?
My focus was classical singing. That was my major. I did some musicals and I took dance class and acting class, and we sang theatre songs occasionally. But my focus had to be on opera and vocal performance and art song.
What was it that made you decide to switch to musical theatre?
At the time—when you’re young—you can be very impatient. And at the time I felt like I was ready to go perform. I had applied for a master’s program in vocal performance and I was too anxious. I wanted to move right to New York. The other thing is I have a great passion for acting. I’m not saying that opera singers don’t act; I just mean straight acting, no singing. So that was a huge pull for me away from opera studies. I wanted to move to New York and study acting, which I did at the Strasberg Academy Institute. And you know, that was just more important to me at the time. I’m glad I did it, obviously. It sent me in the direction I needed to go. I had too many loves, I guess.
Do you still sing classical or operatic music?
I do. I do quite often, yes. I plan to do more opera in my life, so I haven’t given up on it.
Are you currently performing opera professionally or are you preparing to do so?
Definitely preparing, [but] I’m actually doing Yum-Yum in The Mikado at Carnegie Hall [this month], so that [is], I guess, professional. . . .
What other classical music are you working on at the moment?
I’m still working on my coloratura and trying to keep things healthy. It’s been a long time since I’ve been doing a lot of languages, so right now I’m working on some English operas and operettas.
What differences have you discovered when singing classical music versus musical theatre?
Well, it’s absolutely technically different. In fact, I sometimes liken it to, you know, if you’re a runner, you use your quad muscles and they get very tight, and you can’t do ballet anymore. You know what I mean? If you do both of them, you kind of keep everything loose in a way. But it’s definitely using different parts of your muscle.
What about breathing?
You have the same breath support—or you should. I’m as guilty as anybody at, you know, faking my way through things, and of course I use microphones more than I ever thought I would onstage in musical theatre or concerts. I basically have the same idea of support, the idea of breathing, but it’s a terribly different technical beast to do both [classical and musical theatre].
Is it difficult to switch back and forth from classical singing to musical theatre singing?
I don’t belt a lot. You could talk to a person who is a true musical theatre belter, and that’s a different thing, but I don’t think they probably switch back to opera quite as easily. I’m a different kind of musical theatre singer. I’m more open, I think . . . I’m one of your kind of belters. So that means where I’m creating sound is in the same place, it’s just I resonate different and that’s a technical difference, you know? And it’s hard to come back from that. You develop certain muscles and then other ones get tired or looser, you know, they’re not quite as strong. . . . So there’s a major difference.
Would you consider belting?
Well, you know what? I don’t think I need to do any belting. I’m obviously not going to ever be on American Idol, and I’m not going to be in Rent or anything like that, but I feel like any song you give me, I will sing it. I think there’s a misconception about [belting]. We feel like it may not be as piercing or as loud or chesty as the next person, but . . . if you’re actually communicating the song, no matter what [style] it is, I feel like you can present it in a very valid way.
If someone stuck me right now in Wicked as Elphaba or something like that, I could still sing the songs. It may not be as thrillingly belted, but I would never scream it to try to do something that wasn’t in my voice. [For instance], an E for a belter is going to sound for me just as much in a strong place, but it’s not going to be belted. Because over the years, I’ve developed a mix. Some people call it a mix, some people call it one voice; whatever it is, I’ve tried to bring the chest [voice] up and I’ve tried to bring the head [voice] down, and I’ve combined everything so that it’s one voice.
What advice do you have for a classical singer who is studying his or her first musical theatre song?
In musical theatre, the best advice I can give is to communicate the words. [If a young female wanted to sing] “If I Loved You” from Carousel or something—some round, soprano-y song—[I would say] don’t sing it in a big beautiful gorgeous bel canto breath-connected, no-words-meaning-anything kind of way. Break it down to what it really means. Make it simpler. Make it more intimate, and that’s all you have to do. It’s honestly all you have to do. They want the spin, they want the sound, but they don’t want you to turn off from the emotion of it just to make a beautiful sound. I think the difference is it’s about putting a little more spoken word into song.
Would you recommend staying away from belter songs as a first choice?
You know, I had the same fears. Even now, you see a song and you say, “Uh-oh, that’s not really a song for me.” But then you sing it the way you can sing it and all of the sudden it becomes a song that anybody can sing. So I would say, yeah, pick a belting song, and let’s figure out how you sing it best. If you sing something softer where it’s hard for you to get a lot of strength there and then really bring the strength out where your notes are money notes, you can take a song and make it your own every time.
I would tell a young girl [to] pick whatever her favorite song was, and I would make her figure out a way to make it the most unusual, special version of that song we’ve ever heard, and I promise you there would be some strong parts in it. We’d find them. We wouldn’t put the cliché ones there. We would make the ones that were best for her to sing it. The fear of belt songs versus soprano songs, I think that limits all of us, and it’s taken me a long time to figure that out. But I’ve realized, after a long time, nobody cares as long as you do it. As long as you mean it.
One of the reasons I learned this, and I’m still learning every day, was when I was doing South Pacific. I used to belt—meaning it was so low that I could kind of put a lot of it in my chest [voice]—and after I got pregnant my voice completely changed. I came back and learned a different way to sing these songs that I knew so well and knew how to communicate, and no one noticed. That weirded me out, because I was working so hard before and I came back and was doing it in a much easier way, but no one noticed.
So that’s when I learned that as long as you mean it, as long as you are singing it, people are going to enjoy that part of it. It’s so much better than someone trying to scream notes because they think they have to belt them and they’re cracking and worrying and things like that. That’s not what singing is about.
