San Diego has a long history of hiring up-and-coming singers before their careers explode, including the young Placido Domingo, Rénee Fleming and Patricia Racette in past decades.
Now comes soprano Kathleen O’Mara, who will make her company debut as Mimi in two of the three performances of San Diego Opera’s season-opening production of Giacomo Puccini’s “La bohème” next weekend at the San Diego Civic Theatre.
On Sept. 21, O’Mara triumphed at the 2024 Operalia international voice competition in Mumbai, India. Just 20 early-career singers from around the world were invited to compete in the semifinals and finals at the prestigious weeklong event. O’Mara not only won first prize for women vocalists, she also won the Birgit Nilsson Prize for her skill with the German repertoire of Strauss and Wagner.
Winning top prize at the 31-year-old contest has helped launch the careers of many now-famous opera singers, including Joyce DiDonato, Rolando Villazón, Sonya Yoncheva and José Cura. Now O’Mara is the one on the launchpad, and her first post-win production will be singing her first-ever Mimi with San Diego Opera.
“I’ve always wanted to sing Mimi, but I didn’t think I’d get to do it this soon,” she said, during a rehearsal break in San Diego a few weeks ago. “I just love Puccini. It’s a challenge for me, but it’s a good challenge and it’s a fun and wonderful opera. The music is incredible and I love the story.”
Written in 1895, “La bohème” is one of the world’s most-beloved and most-performed operas. It’s the story of a group of impoverished artistic friends and lovers living in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1830s. The central characters are the poet Rodolfo and seamstress Mimi, who fall in love and fight to stay together despite their dire poverty and her failing health.
San Diego Opera’s staging of “La bohème,” directed by Keturah Stickann, is a reimagining of the production she first directed for San Diego Opera during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. It was the nation’s first professional drive-in opera production, presented in the parking lot of Pechanga Arena in San Diego’s Midway district.
Back then, Stickann had to figure out a way to present the intimate love story while following strict social-distancing rules. To keep the singers apart on the stage, Stickann imagined that rather than having the story of Rodolfo and Mimi unspool in real time, it would instead be presented as a memory tale — with Rodolfo writing a memoir many years later about his long-ago love affair with Mimi. Their duets were sung with him at his writing desk and Mimi standing alone in his memories.
The memory-tale production was such a success in San Diego that in 2023 Virginia Opera invited Stickann to re-create it — but this time the singers could touch and sing to each other, allowing the story to shift back and forth in time.
Stickann is presenting her reimagined staging in San Diego, but she’s moving the story forward in time to 1939 Paris, just before the German occupation during World War II, and Rodolfo’s scenes of reflection take place about 15 years later in the mid-1950s.
“I was thinking about how much people were going through in 1939 France, and how deeply tragic it was for the people living a bohemian lifestyle to survive at that time,” Stickann said. “Also, I thought about the trauma of somebody writing their memories of that time in the 1950s, when everything was under reconstruction on the other side of the war. Where does this man end up with all he’s gone through? I thought it would be interesting to explore.”
Stickann, a veteran opera director with more than 70 productions under her belt, got her start in San Diego — not as a stage director but as a longtime company member for Malashock Dance company. After retiring from her 18-year dancing career in 2004, she joined San Diego Opera’s staff as a choreographer and assistant director. She left San Diego in 2011 to move to New York and since 2017 has lived in Knoxville, Tennessee.
When the pandemic arrived in 2020, Stickann said many of the directing jobs she’d booked evaporated. She bided her time during the shutdown doing a podcast from home interviewing opera librettists. So when the chance to direct San Diego Opera’s drive-in “La bohème” came along, she jumped at the opportunity.
“San Diego Opera was one of the places that refused to back down,” she said. “San Diego was a lifesaver.”
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, O’Mara was just finishing up her master’s degree in music at at the Juilliard School in New York City. She decided to stay in the city to continue working with her voice teachers and coaches and doing auditions “for anyone who would hear me.” She supported herself by working as a nanny, a job she loved because she once imagined a career as a children’s music teacher.
O’Mara grew up in a musical family in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, where she started singing in a middle school choir. Later, she joined the Pennsylvania Girlchoir in Philadelphia. She got her first taste of opera in ninth grade, when the Girlchoir performed in a 2009 Opera Philadelphia production of Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” and Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges.”
“I was in awe of the singers,” O’Mara recalled of the experience, “and I knew I was going to do something like that someday. But I didn’t imagine I’d be here doing all of this now.”
When pandemic restrictions lifted, O’Mara landed an apprentice role with Palm Beach Opera. Then in fall 2023, she joined LA Opera’s two-year Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program. She made her LA Opera debut as the small role of the maid Berta in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” in fall 2023, a role she will reprise next year at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
But with her win at Operalia, much bigger roles are now coming O’Mara’s way.
After the awards ceremony Sept. 21, O’Mara boarded a red-eye flight home that night. While changing planes in Istanbul, she turned on her phone to find a massive number of congratulatory texts, emails and social media messages. And by the time her connecting flight landed in New York City, three opera companies had already offered her roles.
O’Mara said she’s now almost fully booked for the 2025-26 season. She also turned down a few role offers because her voice isn’t quite ready for that repertoire yet, but she’s excited that she is now on the radars of several opera companies for future roles.
“I just adore singing Strauss. It’s my favorite and a dream repertoire for the future. I’m also starting to delve into Wagner,” she said.
This season San Diego Opera has made some changes in its programming. All three of its mainstage productions at the Civic Theatre (“Salome” runs March 21-23 and “La Traviata” runs April 25-27) will be presented over one weekend. Because opera singers in major roles need a day of vocal rest between performances, some of the roles have been double-cast.
O’Mara will play Mimi on Friday and Nov. 3, and soprano Sarah Tucker will play Mimi on Saturday, Nov. 2. The role of Rodolfo will be played by tenor Joshua Blue on Friday and Nov. 3 and tenor César Delgado on Saturday. The remaining roles will be played by the same artists at all three performances: Soprano Latonia Moore, as flighty vocal teacher Musetta; baritone Leroy Davis as the painter Marcello; bass Harold Wilson as philosopher Colline; baritone Søren Pedersen as the musician Schaunard; and baritone Michael Sokol as Alcindoro.
Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya will make her company debut leading the San Diego Symphony musicians in the pit. The opera will be sung in its original Italian with English and Spanish supertitles projected above the stage.
O’Mara said she’s looking forward to performing opposite Blue, a Philiadelphia-based singer and good friend who she met through her friendship with Blue’s wife, soprano Ashley Marie Robillard.
A few years ago, O’Mara and Blue performed in a concert for Opera Theatre of St. Louis, where they sang together the Act One duet from “La bohème,” where Rodolfo and Mimi first meet and fall in love.
“His voice is amazing,” O’Mara said of Blue. “I’m really excited to sing the whole thing with him.”
‘La bohème’
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 1-2; 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3
Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Third Ave., downtown
Tickets: $65-$270
Online: sdopera.org