The Ingénue Who Roared
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
AS Nellie Forbush, the sweetheart from Little Rock in the smashing new revival of “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific,” Kelli O’Hara deserves a medal for single-handedly rescuing the ingénue from extinction.

The guile-free young woman in search of love — and almost always finding it — was once a staple of musical theater, when the standard plot of a Broadway show involved at least one happy ending for a boy and girl, and possibly several. But she has virtually become an absent archetype at the theater in recent years, preserved only in pastiche period musicals in which the character is usually dressed in a new frock fringed with irony. (In the currently running “Grease” and “Cry-Baby,” for instance, the good girl seduces the audience’s affections by going happily over to the dark side.)

Good-humored though her Nellie is, Ms. O’Hara is winking at the audience only in character when Nellie puts on a floppy white suit and spoofs a lusty sailor before adoring servicemen in the show-within-a-show number, “Honey Bun.” The true hallmarks of the performance are an unforced sincerity and a reserved tenderness that occasionally blooms into an exuberant joy. Ms. O’Hara’s Nellie is wholesome without being corny as those Kansas fields, sweet without causing the mouth to pucker. And she sings with a radiance that is the sound of hope and happiness made manifest, in a voice that could melt the heart of the most unregenerate musical hater.

“Kelli is a phenomenon,” said Mary Rodgers Guettel, Richard Rodgers’s daughter. She’s also the mother of Adam Guettel, who composed the songs for “The Light in the Piazza,” which provided Ms. O’Hara with a breakthrough role in 2005. “You don’t usually find people that pretty who can sing that pretty. And she’s grown tremendously as an actress. Kelli was a pretty soubrette a few years ago. Now she’s, well, she’s somebody who can do anything.”

I do not envy voters forced to choose among the five women nominated for the Tony for leading actress in a musical, given the wonderfully varied performers gleaming at their brightest in musicals old and new this year.

Patti LuPone stoically cut away all the false bravura in her interpretation of Momma Rose to deliver a throttling performance of “Rose’s Turn” at the climax of “Gypsy” that still raises goosebumps in recollection. In the spellbinding revival of “Sunday in the Park With George,” Jenna Russell brought such dappled feeling to her performance as Georges Seurat’s neglected mistress, Dot, that this watercolor role took on a new clarity. “A Catered Affair” was a perversely wan new musical, to be sure, but Faith Prince fully committed to its sepia-toned sadness, erasing any traces of her trademark bouncy clowning to crawl into the crabbed soul of a woman too defeated by life to crack a smile. And Kerry Butler not only sang like an Aussie angel and goofed with a kittenish allure in “Xanadu,” she did it rolling around on skates!

But I retain a special affection for the limpid beauty of Ms. O’Hara’s achievement in “South Pacific,” a feeling heightened in some measure by sentiment. Her triumphant Nellie may not be a revelation to regular theatergoers familiar with her coolly feisty Babe in the sexed-up revival of “The Pajama Game” opposite Harry Connick Jr., or her breakthrough turn in Mr. Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “Light in the Piazza.” But those career-changing roles followed a span of several years when it seemed possible that Ms. O’Hara’s artistic light would be extinguished by obscurity before it had a chance truly to shine. Encountering some choppy waters on her journey to prominence, Ms. O’Hara, now 32, might have been the ingénue who never was.

She made her Broadway debut as a replacement in the gothic Frank Wildhorn musical “Jekyll & Hyde” in 2000. That was followed by a leading role in the misfired musical adaptation of “Sweet Smell of Success,” which folded quickly in 2002. Then came another bout with Mr. Wildhorn, in “Dracula, the Musical” the second of Broadway’s three recent unmemorable musical tussles with the vampire tribe. (Have you already forgotten “Dance of the Vampires” and “Lestat”? If only I could.) Ms. O’Hara’s appearance caused a little silly chatter because of a brief topless scene, but the controversy died quickly because the musical did too. A minor role in the revival of “Follies” was the small, twinkling bright spot in this Broadway roll call of musical misfortune.

Ms. O’Hara never lacked talent, beauty or enterprise, heaven knows, but she entered the Broadway marketplace during an era when her particular blend of gifts was not regularly being showcased in musical theater. Romance in the 21st-century musical is usually approached with a raised eyebrow, if not an elbow to the ribs (unless it’s accompanied by, say, a cavalcade of Abba songs). Good roles for women in new musicals — not abundant to begin with — tend to favor comedians who can clown it up between the ditties.

It’s not hard to see why. Ingenuousness is almost as disreputable as its opposite today, possibly more so. The new-model female archetype in popular culture is a sexual and financial calculator almost before she has graduated from junior high school. Think of the lusty, upper-crusty schoolgirls in “Gossip Girl,” or the preening soap-operators of “The Hills.” Elle Woods, the ambitious overachiever in “Legally Blonde,” could not really be described as wholesome. Nor could either the green or the blond witch in “Wicked,” the hugely popular musical that starred Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel as revisionist versions of the good and bad witches of the Oz books. (Tellingly, the ingénuesque role in that story, little Dorothy from Kansas, is tossed out entirely.)

Oddly enough, Ms. O’Hara and Ms. Chenoweth, another of today’s great female musical-theater talents, both come from Oklahoma, the heart of the proverbial heartland (just below Kansas, in fact). Born less than a decade apart, they studied with the same voice teacher, Florence Birdwell, at Oklahoma City University. (Ms. O’Hara still studies with Ms. Birdwell.)

But shortly after Ms. Chenoweth made her Broadway debut in “Steel Pier,” her career exploded like a roman candle. She won a Tony for her second Broadway foray, as the smart-mouthed Sally in the revival of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” and cemented her status as the new-model Broadway diva by creating the role of Glinda in “Wicked.” With her cute cartoon face and perky, knowing comic style, Ms. Chenoweth was ideally suited to the prevailing attitude in musicals of the last decade or so, the pop confections with a satiric approach to the conventions of the heart-on-its-sleeve musical.

Ms. O’Hara can be funny — she was a wonderfully gauche Eliza Doolittle in last year’s concert version of “My Fair Lady” with the New York Philharmonic — but she is a quintessential ingénue, exuding a good-heartedness that never feels artificial. The golden-hued voice is used with becoming taste too; Ms. O’Hara sings with a simplicity that puts character before personality, communication before attention-getting vocalism.

A suitable vehicle for Ms. O’Hara’s old-school attributes arrived — in the nick of time, it almost seems — via the emotionally vibrant “Light in the Piazza.” Although it featured an intricate, sophisticated score by Mr. Guettel, “The Light in the Piazza” was the kind of unabashedly full-hearted musical romance that has virtually become extinct on Broadway.

Many, of course, would view the demise of the ingénue as a healthy development in the history of representations of women in American culture. The sweet innocent whose fate resides on finding the right fellow does not speak to women of today, who are as self-reliant and independent as the men they’re competing with for jobs (like, say, the presidency of the United States). It may be significant that the ingénue Ms. O’Hara played in “The Light in the Piazza” dates to the 1950s and even then retained her innocence in part because she was kicked in the head by a horse.

But Bartlett Sher’s “South Pacific” is not a blinkered time-capsule production, and Ms. O’Hara’s Nellie does not shine so brightly simply because she has dusted off an old archetype otherwise left unexamined. For all the warmth and charm Ms. O’Hara brings to the role, her Nellie Forbush is also richly shaded with glimmers of confusion and anxious self-awareness. The performance is like a sunny sky given definition and interest by a few artfully scattered clouds.

The fundamental goodness of Nellie’s heart may never be in doubt — her songs signal that clearly enough — but she is also grappling with the realization that the world is more complicated than she imagined it to be. Ms. O’Hara movingly shows us Nellie’s struggles with the urge to retreat from it, to take refuge in comforting ideas she has come to see as confining and even corrupt. The emotional transitions can be read in the subtle changes in the timbre of her voice and the way Nellie seems to close off and open up as she alternately gives in to and resists the process of self-discovery.

Mr. Sher’s production taps into the resonant humanity in the material that could easily be ignored by simply presenting it as a flawlessly constructed period entertainment. The performances, in roles both big and small, have a spontaneity that makes you feel that the characters’ lives extend beyond the frame of the musical.

This sense of aliveness is perhaps best exemplified by Ms. O’Hara’s ebullient performance of “A Wonderful Guy,” in which Nellie, having just decided to end her romance with Emile de Becque, realizes with a suddenness that makes her giddy that there is no gainsaying the feeling sweeping through her.

Everyone with even a glancing knowledge of the Broadway songbook is familiar with the number. Obviously Ms. O’Hara has studied it with care, but she performs it as a burst of pure feeling bubbling forth from an overfilled heart. Nellie seems to be finding words for the rush in her bloodstream line by line, moment by delirious moment. Even if you know the lyrics by heart, you may find yourself suffused with surprise at the felicity and self-mocking humor of each familiar image, sharing in Nellie’s delighted feeling that, though people have been singing of moons and junes forever, she’s the first human being to truly discover that “love is a grand and a beautiful thing.”