Longing And Belonging

The art of aspiration in “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Be More Chill.”

- Hilton Als

Although I have seen the theatre treasure Kelli O’Hara on Broadway only a handful of times—including in her Tony Award-winning performance as Anna, in the 2015 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I”—I always feel as though I’d just watched her in one thing or another, or read something about her, or maybe even glimpsed her on the street. This sensation is due, in large part, to the familiarity she projects onstage and engenders in her audience, regardless of the role she’s playing. Lovely and light in her approach to her characters’ motivations and actions, O’Hara expresses herself through a very particular prism: she makes us feel that, no matter what conflicts tear at the seams of the story being told, it somehow relates to all of us. And it’s a pleasure to watch as O’Hara refuses to allow pretense into her pretending: in her best work, she shows, as clearly as she can and without overthinking her impulses, what defines you and you and you. Possessed of an exceptional warmth and charity toward other performers, though never condescending, she’s an actress who is free, it seems, of “drama.”

To my mind, only O’Hara could have taken on the role of Cathy Whitaker, a nineteen-fifties housewife who becomes romantically involved with a black man, in the 2013 musical version of Todd Haynes’s 2002 movie, “Far from Heaven.” There were a lot of plot points to cover in the show—Cathy’s husband is gay, the town she lives in is pretty much segregated, and so on— yet O’Hara presented the story not as a series of crises, the shattering and remaking of various intimacies, but, rather, as an opportunity to offer the audience a view into the ways in which society can dictate how women live their lives. It was a mournful show, and O’Hara added a kind of unwritten score beneath the musical proper. It was a small, plaintive, l