No person doubted that Lea Salonga may sing.
She had received a Tony Award on the era of 20 for her breakout function because the besotted Vietnamese teenager Kim in “Miss Saigon,” and sung her center out as Éponine, and next Fantine, in Broadway productions of “Les Misérables.” She supplied the crystalline vocals of now not one however two Disney princesses: the warrior heroine of 1998’s “Mulan” and the witchcraft carpet-riding Princess Jasmine in 1992’s “Aladdin.”
However may the singer maintain Sondheim — a composer heralded for growing one of the maximum difficult, idiosyncratic paintings viewable at the American level — on Broadway? May just she inhabit a personality like Momma Rose, the monstrous, pathologically determined level mom from “Gypsy”? Or Mrs. Lovett from “Sweeney Todd,” the butcher/baker who breaks indisposed the selling demanding situations of hawking pies stuffed with human meat, in a Cockney pronunciation, incorrect much less?
“Some of it’s hard,” Salonga admitted.
However she is doing all that and extra in “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” recently enjoying on the Ahmanson Theater right here in Los Angeles next a 16-week run in London’s West Finish. Scheduled to start previews on Broadway on the Samuel J. Friedman Theater after life, the display options greater than 3 batch songs from a few of Sondheim’s largest musicals, together with “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “A Little Night Music” and “Into the Woods.” The tribute revue additionally stars Bernadette Peters, who, incorrect stranger to Sondheim, put her personal indelible stamp at the personality of Momma Rose in 2003.
Salonga, Peters mentioned, “has one of the great Broadway voices, and she just brings down the house.”
For Salonga, “I’m getting the chance to sing some of the most incredible lyrics ever written. I’m getting to dip, not just a toe, but my entire body, into this incredible work.”
“Nobody was surprised how terrific she was as a performer,” mentioned the display’s manufacturer Cameron Waterproof coat, who additionally solid Salonga in “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables.”
“The real surprise was how funny she is,” he persevered. “There weren’t that many laughs in ‘Miss Saigon’ or ‘Les Miz,’ obviously, so I didn’t know that side of her.”
The display marks Salonga’s go back to the Middle Theater Staff in L.A., the place she endmost seemed in David Henry Hwang’s 2001 revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Flower Drum Song.”
In some ways, that display was once a soar of religion for her. The 1958 actual hadn’t elderly specifically smartly, with its mail-order brides and a musical tribute to variety titled “Chop Suey.” And via that pace in her occupation, Salonga may well be picky.
“There was no one, particularly at that time period, who had achieved the combination of artistic and commercial success on Broadway that Lea had,” Hwang mentioned. “We were really lucky to get her.”
Salonga’s occupation has been like that: a mixture of breakout performances (the primary Asian Éponine and Fantine on Broadway) and leaps of religion, like “Flower Drum Song” and her contemporary function in “Here Lies Love,” which recast the story of Imelda Marcos as a disco musical.
“I never thought I’d see that story on Broadway,” Salonga mentioned.
Within the procedure, she’s opened doorways for others within the theater, as each an suggest, talking out in opposition to racial discrimination in Hollywood and on Broadway, and case in point.
“She’s obviously been a big voice for diversity in casting from the very beginning,” mentioned Matthew Bourne, the Tony-winning director of “Old Friends.” “But she’s also been an icon and inspiration for so many of the younger members of our cast.”
On a up to date morning, Salonga was once in a cafe overlooking the Ahmanson Theater, speaking about a few of her earliest days as a kid celebrity in her local Philippines, her breakout roles on Broadway, and her reunion with Waterproof coat for “Old Friends.”
“Quite a few of us had done ‘Les Miz’ for him,” Salonga recalled. “So I think he just wanted the show to be populated with people he knew, and that he knew would be good.”
Salonga first met Waterproof coat in 1988, and was once selected to play games Kim within the West Finish manufacturing of “Miss Saigon” next an in depth ability seek. “Cameron likes to think he discovered her,” Bourne mentioned with amusing. “And in many ways, he did.”
However Salonga was once already a celeb within the Philippines via the pace Cameron got here calling, having seemed in “The King and I” at 7 and because the celebrity of “Annie” at 9. Involved in whether or not Salonga, upcoming 17, would be capable to maintain the force of making a song in venues like London’s 2,000-seat Drury Lane Theater, Cameron requested her what kinds of crowds she had performed for.
3 weeks previous, she instructed him, she had opened for Stevie Marvel.
“At which point I said to myself, ‘Cameron, shut up,’” Waterproof coat recalled.
“Miss Saigon” went directly to turn out to be some of the international’s maximum frequent musicals, enjoying for 10 years in London and securing Salonga a Laurence Olivier Award for best possible actress in a musical. But if the display was once slated to come back to Broadway in 1991, it ignited a firestorm for its yellowface casting of the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce within the function of the Engineer.
Salonga additionally got here beneath hearth from the Actors’ Fairness Affiliation, which felt that the a part of Kim will have to travel to an Asian American.
Finally, Salonga and Pryce had been introduced over for the Broadway run, each successful Tonys within the procedure. Salonga was the primary Asian actress to win the award. “I was on cloud nine that night,” she mentioned.
“And after Jonathan Pryce’s casting, which definitely was controversial, every single actor that got to play that role was of Asian descent,” she persevered. “So that was a big victory for Asian actors.”
One of the vocal protesters in opposition to the yellowface casting in “Miss Saigon” was once Hwang, who even wrote a play games about it, “Yellow Face,” which opened on the Mark Taper Discussion board in 2007 and played on Broadway last fall. When Hwang requested Salonga to celebrity in his revival of “Flower Drum Song” in 2012, it was once with that historical past in thoughts.
“We’ve talked about it,” he mentioned. “But she was a very young actress who blew the part away both in London and the U.S. And none of my objections to ‘Saigon’ and the casting of Jonathan Pryce had a lot to do with Pryce personally, and certainly not Lea, so there wasn’t much to talk about.”
“One of the good things we did talk about was how ‘Miss Saigon’ created a cohort of performers of Asian ancestry who got experience on Broadway and learned how to command a Broadway stage,” he added. “A huge number of actors who we ended up casting in ‘Flower Drum Song,’ including Lea, had cut their teeth there.”
A decade next, in 2021, Salonga teamed up with Hwang once more for #StopAsianHate, an internet motion that arose based on an upswell of anti-Asian dislike crimes all through the pandemic.
“I remember seeing the news about a Filipino lady who was attacked in front of an apartment building in Manhattan, and the doorman didn’t even try to help her,” she mentioned. “So I thought it was important for me, for all of us, to speak out when one of us is attacked.”
In 2023, the Broadway manufacturing of “Here Lies Love” presented Salonga the probability to inform a tale near to her center: the get up and fall of Imelda Marcos and the beginnings of the Population Energy Revolution within the Philippines. The display additionally marked the primary pace Salonga were given to play games a Filipino on Broadway, headlining an all-Filipino cast.
“I’ve played Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, French twice,” she mentioned. “Never Filipino. Our stories never made it to Broadway until then.”
Nearest that generation, Waterproof coat known as upon Salonga to co-star within the West Finish manufacturing of “Old Friends.” “There was only a handful of people I thought could possibly co-star with Bernadette,” he mentioned.
“Steve writes about the human condition,” Peters mentioned. “So you have to get to the heart of it all. But if you follow the map of what he writes, because he really has thought out everything so well, it’s all there.”
Amongst Salonga’s considerations: doing justice to Mrs. Lovett’s Cockney pronunciation in entrance of a space stuffed with Londoners. She had carried out the function of the serial killer’s partner and romantic spouse in productions of “Sweeney Todd” in Manila and Singapore in 2019, however Drury Lane was once one thing else.
“In London, I did not give myself any breathing room,” she mentioned. “I needed to make sure I nailed it every day.”
“I’m a Londoner, and actually a real Cockney as well,” Bourne, the director, mentioned. “And her accent is very good, and gets better and better. But that’s Lea, though. She gets better and better at everything she does.”
Later her run in Los Angeles and Unused York, Salonga will go back to the Philippine musical level for the primary pace in six years to do, sure, extra Sondheim, starring because the Witch in “Into the Woods,” a job she performed there 3 many years in the past.
“I’m getting to do all kinds of Sondheim now,” she mentioned. “If I could just do Sondheim until the day I die, I’d be happy.”
“The goal isn’t to be 100 percent perfect at everything you do,” she persevered. “That’s not it at all. It’s to be a good human, to be a responsible, disciplined, excellent performer. That’s a reputation I like to think I have. And I’d like to keep it that way! That I’m someone you can rely on to put on a good show.”
