She starred as Clara in the 2005 Broadway production of "The Light in the Piazza" at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. She had appeared in a workshop of the musical at the Theatre Lab at Sundance, and in tryouts in Seattle and Chicago, as the character of Franca. She received a 2005 Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical. O'Hara has been nominated for, or won, a Tony Award for every subsequent role she has played on Broadway. In her next Broadway musical, she played Babe in the 2006 revival of "The Pajama Game", for which she was nominated for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. For this performance, "New York Times" reviewer Ben Brantley wrote that O'Hara "rockets past the promising ingénue status she attained with "Light in the Piazza"".