Kelli O'Hara Brings Luminous Voice To Scottsdale Center For The Performing Arts

Kelli O'Hara's "gleaming" (The New York Times) and "dulcet" (Financial Times) voice brings renewed energy to classics of the Broadway stage on Jan. 27, 2018, when she and pianist/commentator Seth Rudetsky perform songs from the great musicals at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts.

Their appearance is part of the series "Mark Cortale's Broadway @ Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts" at the Center's Virginia G. Piper Theater. The series features cabaret-style concerts by Broadway stars, accompanied by Rudetsky and mixed with candid showbiz stories.

O'Hara, who shot to stardom in 2005 as Clara in the Tony® Award-winning musical Light in the Piazza, won the Tony for Best Lead Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Anna Leonowens in The King and I in the 2015 revival at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Her other roles have included Nellie in the Lincoln Center revival of South Pacific (2008) and the female lead in the musical version of The Bridges of Madison County (2014). Beyond Broadway, O'Hara made her New York Metropolitan Opera debut in 2014 in the operetta The Merry Widow, and continued the operatic side of her career as Dido in a New York production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in 2016.

On television, O'Hara has been seen in NBC's Peter Pan Live! and in guest appearances in the series Masters of Sex and 13 Reasons Why. Critics have consistently lavished praise on the Oklahoma native. When she appeared earlier this year (2017) in the Encores! production of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon, Jeremy Gerard of Deadline Hollywood wrote: "O'Hara is impossibly beautiful, vocally and in conveying Fiona's romantic determination and heartbreak."

Seth Rudetsky was born in the town of North Woodmere on Long Island, New York, and graduated in piano performance from Oberlin College in 1988. He then launched a career as pit pianist for such shows as Ragtime, Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera. He found a knack for commentary, and expanded his career to include arts broadcast journalism, with two shows on Sirius XM that feature interviews with major Broadway stars, and deconstructions of major musicals: Seth's Big Fat Broadway and Seth Speaks. He also writes the Onstage & Backstage column for Playbill magazine, and is a composer, with the score for the musical, Disaster!, to his credit. For the Jan. 27 performance at the Center, Rudetsky will accompany O'Hara in numbers from classic musicals and will add his distinctive observations on the songs, the shows and the songwriters.

Tickets: $89 (M $81) / $69 / $59

www.ScottsdaleArts.org

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