Photograph by Mark Gilliland
Kelly Kaduce slowly unzips her boots, then slides her perfectly manicured toes into Prada sandals. She carefully selects a hand-painted scarf from an armful of possibilities, ignoring murmurs of advice, and stands poised on sequined cone heels while the stylist smooths a shimmer of lotion on her ankle. Then she begins posing, arching her neck and changing expression without being prompted. She bends her wrist just so, angles her elbow, adopts those slightly awkward positions that look, through a lens, improbably graceful.
“So you’ve done this before?”
“A lot,” she grins, gratefully reaching for hot tea. MoBot’s Mediterranean Garden might be temperate, but it’s not balmy, and Kaduce’s pale, creamy shoulders, exposed by the tissue-thin black halter gown, are getting ducky bumps. The stylist fusses with the gown, tugging for décolletage. “Bring your hand up on top of the gate,” the photographer suggests, and instead of clutching the bar like a desperate prisoner, she reaches through so the back of her hand faces him, graceful and languorous.
Kaduce is the new sort of diva, lithe and instinctively glamorous. Her smile is carefully composed, never toothy or taut or lopsided, and her body reads as sultry, almost catlike—every cliché of sensuality works. Yet she’s still a Minnesota girl, a master plumber’s daughter from Winnebago who, when the photographer asks if the sun’s in her eyes, says cheerfully, “Yeah. Is that what you want?”
Her career soaring, she keeps getting asked to pose; last year, she made the cover of Opera News, for a profile that lauded her “plangent, amber-toned” voice. She’s still puzzling out “plangent.” For the modeling, she’s “done a lot of research. I’ll stand in front of the mirror and try different angles, and I’ve watched some of those ‘top model’ shows.”
Kaduce didn’t bargain for this: She’s a singer, not a model. But the hot glamour that swept through classical music has just hit opera. Even the guys don’t get a pass: Young, well-muscled baritone Nathan Gunn keeps getting photographed shirtless. Still, there will always be room in opera for the not-quite-packaged, the wimpy or frumpy or blowsy, when their voice amazes. “When you are doing something this highly trained, your looks aren’t what sells it for you,” Kaduce says. “You have to have the goods first.”
She flew in this winter to perform with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; now she’s back for her fifth role with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, this time starring in Salome. The production reinterprets the Biblical tale, and Bruno Schwengl’s costume designs nod to the current collections of Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, Gianfranco Ferré, and others.
Kaduce can’t wait. She grew up a tomboy—“The most glamorous I got was coveting a pair of Guess jeans in sixth grade!”—but now, she loves beautiful clothes. And she thinks the old notion that you have to be ample-bosomed to sing is silly. “It’s more about how in shape you are, especially for roles like Butterfly [OTSL, 2008], with lots of running around. If you’re too thin, you lose muscle tone, but if you’re too big, you have a hard time catching your breath.” She does yoga and runs marathons with her husband, baritone Lee Gregory, although she refuses to diet.
Opera owes its new glamour to Hollywood, she says. “But unlike film stars, we don’t get free clothing and jewels on loan, so I try to do my shopping on a budget. Your Plaza Frontenac has great sales in spring; if you don’t buy something too trendy, you can buy it out of season.”
Onstage, her most glamorous costume may have been the pink Chanel suit, coat, and hat, “very chichi,” for La Bohème—or the mermaidy, bias-cut dress she wore for Rusalka, custom-fit to slide, to her delight, right over her “nice-sized hips.” But she also loved being a nun, with a short choppy wig and no makeup, in Suor Angelica (OTSL, 2004). (When the director asked, “How do you feel about nudity?” she did a double take: “Aren’t I playing a nun?” Turned out he wanted her to mock breast-feed a dead child. And so she did.)
In Salome, she’ll be a teenage girl using her wiles to seduce John the Baptist—and then, spurned and utterly mad, demanding his head on a platter. “I love playing characters who are crazy,” she says. “It’s fun to be able to pull out emotions you don’t necessarily use very often; it’s a kind of release.”
No photo shoot comes close to opera—the aliveness of the sound, the energy rebounding from the audience. “There’s something visceral about hearing a voice come sailing over the orchestra, unmiked,” she says. “It vibrates through your whole body.”
Salome runs May 30 through June 28 (tickets through opera-stl.org, 314-961-0644), and Kaduce and Gregory perform together at Cabaret St. Louis (Kranzberg Arts Center, 401 N. Grand, 314-726-1616, metrotix.com) on June 16 at 8 p.m. Photo shot at the Missouri Botanical Garden, styling by Priscilla Case of TalentPlus and wardrobe courtesy of Neiman Marcus. Dress, Donna Karan Couture; sandals, Prada; bronze earrings, cuff, and ring, Stephen Dweck; cashmere shawl, Loro Piana; one-of-a-kind hand-painted scarf, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis Boutique.
