On Thursday, Tony Award-winning Broadway star kelliohara gave us vocals, performing a bravura solo concert while accompanied by the dazzling chicagosymphony.
Kelli O’Hara performs with the CSO led by conductor Steve Reineke at 2022 Corporate Night event.
Setting the concert in motion was a lush rendering of Richard Rodgers’ overture to “South Pacific” . It was the perfect warmup for O’Hara’s arrival on stage in a beautiful silvery gown, and after her spirited rendering of “A Wonderful Guy” she launched into a tribute to Stephen Sondheim with “What More Do I Need?,” a terrific song from his ill-fated early musical, “Saturday Night.
O’Hara then returned to “South Pacific,” singing the achingly beautiful “This Nearly Was Mine,” the song about a perceived lost love that also is ordinarily performed by a male character with a sonorous, operatic voice. But O’Hara made it her own, using the operatic quality of her soprano voice to ideally capture the song’s emotion.
Next came the concert’s hilarious show-stopper, “They Don’t Let You In the Opera , and finally reaches its coloratura climax in a knockout sequence in which she goes into labor , riffs about the Grand Ole Opry, and pushes out a baby. You really had to be there to appreciate all this.