By Taffy Brodesser-AknerPhotographs by Brenda Ann Kenneally

May 30, 2019

Kelli O’Hara kisses her children and husband goodbye, buys a salad and boards a train in coastal Connecticut eight times a week to star as Lilli/Kate in “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Tony-nominated revival at Studio 54 for which O’Hara herself was nominated this year, too, for Best Actress in a musical. It’s her seventh Tony nomination — she has one win, in 2015 for Best Actress in “The King and I” — and it’s her 11th Broadway show. She has been doing this for a very long time.

Kelli O’Hara and Will Chase running through the choreography for a fight scene in “Kiss Me, Kate.”Video by Sasha Arutyunova

It’s a different crowd every night. That might seem obvious, but it doesn’t always make sense when it’s the same group of indistinct, shadowed faces. Once you’ve got the lines, the songs, the dance moves, the real work is in figuring out a way to deliver them to the people as if they were the only ones to ever receive them.

O’Hara’s dressing room is small, but big for Broadway. It’s filled with flowers sent over by people congratulating her for her nomination. But this year she is not nervous: She has what she calls the “Zen release” of already having won one. Plus, people love an underdog. The minute you’re not an underdog, yes, you won, but that’s not really the same as everyone loving you.

She arrives at the theater sometime between 6 and 6:30 each evening — earlier, obviously, for the matinees — so that she can steam her vocal cords with a personal humidifier she bought at CVS and do her vocal exercises (soft scales and consonants). That has always been part of her routine, but now she also does yoga in the hour before performance: sun salutation, high lunge, side angle pose, triangle.

During the sun salutation, she beseeches her Alexa to time her for a minute in a plank, and during that minute she holds her body in a tight line, hovering above the Oriental rug that is part of the homey atmosphere that someone else created for her. Some of the stuff is hers: the pictures her kids made that hang around the bulbed mirror, a toy box for when they visit, the collection of teas, the crepe-paper streamers from her birthday a few weeks ago. But mostly it’s someone else’s stuff: curtains, a pink velvet fainting couch, books on the shelves. The minute is almost over.

She didn’t always need to do this; it used to be that she could just go onstage. But she’s 43 now, and she’s rubbing the acromion region of her shoulder as she talks — no injury, it just hurts. So, yes, if she doesn’t warm her body up, she’ll feel it later. It never even occurred to her, except that last summer she performed in London, where they have mandatory warm-ups; it changed her thinking. Her kids are small, 9 and 5, so sometimes she might run late and shorten the warm-ups, though if she does that, she suffers: She will be achy, or she won’t have enough energy. She has worked on films and on TV, and she knows that those people, who don’t even perform every night, who rarely sing while they act and who know that they have infinite chances to get a take right, have massage therapists waiting on set.

O’Hara’s hair is pinned in curls so that a microphone can be wired beneath her wig.

Around 7:15 p.m., she is called down to the stage for fight call, in which she and Will Chase, who plays her ex-husband, run through the choreography of their extended fight scene, in which she kicks him in the butt several times and he kicks her butt (revivals are weird). They do this every day, no matter what, to remind themselves that there’s acting, there’s singing, but there’s also the risk of becoming so relaxed with each other — indeed, they do this entire rehearsal laughing — that they get hurt. There are so many moving parts in the show, and none of them can stop if you get hurt. Just look at her ring finger: There’s maybe about four millimeters of nail in the nail bed and nothing more because she got her hand stuck in a door one night in February, during the “I Hate Men” number. She slammed the door, and … her finger was inside the door. She couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t coming free. She stopped for a second, but she still had one phrase left to sing. She called for help in the pause, and once her hand was released, she managed to finish, in shock. Her nail was gone. The point is, if you’re prepared on other fronts, it’s easier to handle the occasional crisis.

She spends some time with her mouth over a vocal steamer, but then Richard, the hair guy, comes in to spin her blond hair into pin curls so that he can weave a microphone through them and then seal them under a stocking and then put someone else’s blond hair on top of the stocking. Richard just did this for another actress in the room across the way. He does almost 100 pin curls a night. How long has Richard been doing this? He was the first person to ever pin curl O’Hara for her first Broadway show 17 years ago.

Almost ready to go onstage.

She spends the rest of her time doing her own makeup. Someone at the beginning of the show’s run will teach her what her makeup should be like, but from then on, it’s just her, just some CoverGirl, just some Maybelline, just some Nars, just some Chanel, just some MAC. Last year, she was performing at the Met, and on a night when they were recording the performance in HD, they did this dramatic makeup for her, but it was really too much, so she needed it taken off. The makeup is everything. You have to look like a real person so that you feel like a real person.

A man calls through an intercom that it’s 30 minutes to showtime, then 15. It’s time for O’Hara to dress. It’s time for her to find the thing inside her that is somehow able to remember that the people in the audience are seeing this for the first time, that they deserve the best of her. How do you keep a thing like that in your head? She closes the door, and now she does her real vocal exercises, the ones she didn’t want to do in front of a reporter, the reporter guesses, and now, throughout backstage, there’s the sound of opera, the sound of theater, the sound that all those two hours created and erected and built toward fortitude. Now she’s ready.