Entertainment

How Kelli O’Hara plays the anti-Mrs. Draper

Kelli O’Hara teams again with Steven Pasquale as a desperate but perfectly coiffed housewife.

Kelli O’Hara teams again with Steven Pasquale as a desperate but perfectly coiffed housewife. (Joan Marcus)

That blond hair and pearls, those pumps and poise. When the curtain rises on “Far From Heaven,” it’s hard not to think, OMG, it’s Betty Draper!

But the setting is 1957 Connecticut, and the woman we see isn’t the ice queen of “Mad Men,” but Cathy Whitaker. Hopelessly in love — with both her closeted gay husband and their African-American gardener — this desperate housewife is everything Betty isn’t: nurturing, unbiased and kind.

It helps that she’s played by Kelli O’Hara, the blue-eyed belle of Broadway and go-to revival gal (“Pajama Game,” “South Pacific”). Her stairway to “Heaven,” opening Sunday at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons, meant leaving Matthew Broderick in “Nice Work If You Can Get It” — a new musical that only seems like a revival, thanks to its giddy Gershwin score.

And while “Nice Work” led to her fourth Tony nomination, it wasn’t easy jumping up and down on a couch with Broderick — or anyone else — while pregnant.

“I did ‘South Pacific’ till I was 5 1/2 months, which was pretty crazy, too,” says the 37-year-old, whose second child is due in September, barely months before “Heaven” ends its run on July 7. “I’m trying not to waddle!”

So far, she’s managing beautifully — and those ’50s swing coats help, too. Still, she has 19 costume changes, most of them involving 4-inch heels.

“I won’t say it’s easy,” O’Hara sighed the other day in her dressing room, wearing her preshow flats. “I love heels, but when I’m done I throw them to my dresser and put slippers on.”

She hadn’t expected to be expecting when “Far From Heaven,” by the “Grey Gardens” team of Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, started workshops a few years ago. But life intervened.

“I told them I was pregnant, and they were wonderful,” she says. “They actually thought it was funny, because Julianne Moore was six months pregnant when she made the [2002] movie!”

Unlike her feisty heroines of late, Cathy Whitaker, obedient wife and doting mother, is a different breed. And while O’Hara’s played vulnerable women before — her first Tony nod came as the damaged girl in “The Light in the Piazza” — her characters haven’t contended with forbidden love, interracial and gay.

Nor did O’Hara. She says that, growing up in a conservative small town in 1980s Oklahoma, the notion of gay parents was “the most alien thing in the world.” She wasn’t alone.

“I had a co-star [from Texas] who was raised by her mother and her mother’s friends over the years, and they never talked about it,” she says. “As a grown woman, she knows her mother was a lesbian and these women were her partners, but they never discussed it. That breaks my heart a little bit, because they never displayed affection in their own home, except behind closed doors.”

Her “Far From Heaven” husband is Steven Pasquale, of TV’s “Rescue Me,” real-life hubby of O’Hara’s friend Laura Benanti. He and O’Hara teamed before, in “Piazza,” but he’s just one in a long line of studly leading men: Matthew Morrison, bari-hunks Paulo Szot and Nathan Gunn, and Harry Connick Jr., whose “Pajama Game” scenes with her sizzled. So did rumors, and yes, she’s tired of talking about it.

“Please,” she says. “It was hurtful. But we knew that and actually played into it. The more we could light fire up there . . . I was just getting engaged to my husband at the time, so the whole thing was preposterous.”

Her husband is singer/songwriter Greg Naughton (son of actor James), and their joint projects include Owen, nearly 4, and the baby girl whose name they’ve yet to announce. After that, O’Hara returns to Pasquale for yet another new musical, “The Bridges of Madison County.”

“I’ll continue to do revivals because I love them,” she says. “But the dream roles are things I don’t know about yet.”