Sutton Foster and Kelli O’Hara with the San Francisco Symphony
Posted: 7/20/26 at 12:44pm
Posted: 7/20/26 at 1:42pm
Saw them at Carnegie Hall in November 2023 with the NY Pops. It was a fantastic concert. I believe that was their first concert together. Perhaps it's changed a bit now that they have been doing it for several years now.
Posted: 7/20/26 at 2:20pm
Saw them Saturday night, both in great voice. The first half was more traditional musical theatre music that the majority of the older audience came for. The second half, more the Carol and Julie theme, was more 1990s pop music which showed their voices and versatility off well, but did not make good use of the full symphony orchestra on stage. It was a good evening, but more of the Broadway catalogue was needed for this audience, mostly past 60 years old.
Posted: 7/20/26 at 4:56pm
They received a negative review in the SF Chronicle -- about how they squandered their talents and the symphony orchestra on material that the audience did not particularly come to hear or enjoy, even though they enjoyed the talents of these two ladies.
That’s why Sutton Foster and Kelli O’Hara’s appearance at Davies Symphony Hall was such a disappointing missed opportunity.
Yet there’s an impossibly vast canon of musical theater transcendence out there. Why sing novelty numbers your music directors wrote for you when we could get more renditions like O’Hara’s take on “If I Loved You” from “Carousel”? In that solo, her soprano was tremulous, and she brought the same focus and force whether her voice was a tiny pinhole of light or a blazing celestial orb. Conductor Michael Rafter brought out each piece of a chord — piano, harp, strings — like petals opening on a blossom.
That’s what most of us came to see. Except for Foster and O’Hara completists, this particular set list, which has been touring since a Carnegie Hall appearance in 2023, can stay in the ephemera box.
It’s not that the two Tony Award winners sounded bad on Saturday, July 18. Foster, with her glittery, reedy belt, is the perfect complement to O’Hara’s unvarnished airy soprano. Occasionally, as on the jazzy number “Great Adventure” from the musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” their voices somehow both sharpen and soften each other, like an oboe-flute duet.
The problem, rather, was the format.
The evening’s patter — “As long as we’re havin’ fun!” — was painful. Song choices, with notable exceptions, failed to show the divas’ voices at their best. Multiple numbers, such as “Big D” from “The Most Happy Fella” and “They Don’t Let You in the Opera,” required Southern accents, and sometimes the only vocal quality audible above the orchestra’s volume was twang.
Medley upon medley gave us too few chances to go deep with a musical idea or emotional arc, with an overall effect that was like swiping through TikTok videos. In one ‘90s medley, while it was hilarious to hear O’Hara suddenly bust out in Nirvana, the arrangement dragged on so long that the musicians seemed to be silently screaming, “Why?”
Not every concert by a Broadway star has to be the same. Delectable as it was to hear Foster’s sultry and sly opening glissando on “Anything Goes,” that doesn’t mean she and O’Hara must stick to their repertoire of best-known hits from their best-known shows.
