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Kelli O'Hara No Cartwheels (for Now), but Oodles of Spunk

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Americas sweetheart: inside the hothouse of the Broadway musical that label, applied to movie stars from Mary Pickford to Julia Roberts, would surely belong to Kelli OHara.

Her winsome portrayal of Nellie Forbush in the revival of South Pacific cinched the title for her. On Wednesday this radiant, wholesome singing actress from Oklahoma with one foot in country music and the other in opera brought her spunky all-American charm to the Caf Carlyle for two weeks.

Kelli OHara has started a two-week run at the Caf Carlyle. Ms. OHara, who is pregnant and expecting in July, is on leave from South Pacific. (There is a time to stop doing onstage cartwheels, she joked.)

Her act is a scaled-down, revised and revitalized edition of the program she performed last year at the Allen Room as part of Lincoln Centers American Songbook series: instead of 10 musicians she used 4 (the pianist Adam Ben-David, the bassist Mark Vanderpool, the drummer Howard Joines and the violinist Antoine Silverman, who treated his instrument like a country fiddle when the occasion demanded).

The intimacy of the Caf Carlyle, along with the fact that Ms. OHara has been living with much of this material for some time, transformed a program that had felt tentative at the Allen Room into a debut that suggested the arrival of a homecoming queen. From the moment she walked onstage Ms. OHara took charge, keeping her bright lyric soprano, with its reserves of coloratura, front and center and interspersing songs with breezy, informative patter.

The material from The Light in the Piazza in particular took on an expansive new life. The title song, slowed down and treated more operatically than it was on Broadway, became a devout profession of faith in the miraculous, glimpsed for a transcendent moment. She reinterpreted Fable, Victoria Clarks bittersweet anthem, which was underlined with a stronger beat to reflect the belief in fairy-tale endings held by Ms. OHaras romantically besotted character.

Her renditions of two Stephen Sondheim songs, “What More Do I Need?" and “Take Me to the World," as well as “The Boy Next Door" (addressed to her husband, Greg Naughton) and “A Wonderful Guy from South Pacific," embodied the sound and attitude of the contemporary Broadway ingnue. This lovely creature is not the simpering, twittering airhead of traditional operetta and its offshoots but a homespun, levelheaded gal with her feet on the ground, a sense of humor and a steady gaze fixed on the horizon.

Kelli OHara appears through April 15 at the Caf Carlyle, Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan; (212) 744-1600, thecarlyle.com

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