Kelli O'Hara Piazza Part Swap

In an interview Kelli said that Ceelia was reading to young to portray a sexually aware 26 year old girl, so she was fired and Kelli was promoted up because she could read young and older at the same time.

I've heard and read that the creatives felt Keenan-Bolger just read too young for Clara, regardless of how they styled her. So I think she was let go from Piazza and THEN went into Spelling Bee, as opposed to leaving Piazza for Spelling Bee.

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Adam had a Lot to do with this casting.

According to interviews of both Celia and Kelli, it was a combination of Celia looking too young, and Guettel wanting a more operatic sound. I thought that part sounded a bit odd since so much of Clara's material seemed (to me) to be sung with a straight tone.

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And then Celia went onto play a jaded alcoholic in the first act of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. And she wasn't half bad.

So much for being too young.

Yeah, but that was ten years later. What she ended up doing immediately after Piazza was playing a child.

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Celia has mentioned in a few interviews that she often does get stuck playing very 'young' parts. She was 13 in Peter & the Starcatcher, but I think the role of Molly is still a nice, juicy, challenging role. She seems happy with playing those roles now, but I think she does want to play 'older', hence Merrily.

She does, but only to the age of a college student, which is different from playing a child. And the thing about Merrily is that no matter who you cast, at some point in the show, they're going to be age inappropriate for the part and it's going to be a stretch of the imagination for the audience. That's just part of Merrily, and there's nothing wrong with it.

The other thing worth mentioning about the young parts Celia is playing, like Olive and Molly, is that these are parts in shows where the choice was explicitly made to have adults playing children. It's not like she's being swapped in for real children in parts that are meant to be played by kids who are actually ten or thirteen or whatever. If they'd wanted to use real kids in these shows, surely they could have, but they've chosen to tell the stories differently.

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http://americantheatrewing.org/downstagecenter/detail/kelli_ohara