Lea Salonga Interview: 'I get to have a direct relationship with the audience, to tell my stories'

Lea Salonga and I meet in the Diana Room at the Gielgud Theatre just as the Sondheim revue Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is entering its final two weeks. In this bijou receiving room just off the dress-circle concourse you are in another world – hidden and elegantly niche – where special guests are routinely entertained before and during intermission of the show. Diana Room? No, not that Diana but rather Cameron Mackintosh’s beloved mother who is commemorated in some treasured framed photographs and cuttings. I did wonder if Salonga herself had suggested the location as a quiet place for us to reflect on a career which owes so much to the legendary producer.

At 18 years of age, she was already (as I am about to discover) an ‘old hand’ in the business when Boublil and Schönberg’s Miss Saigon beckoned in 1989. Her astounding performance as Kim won her both Olivier and Tony Awards and would lead, inevitably, to her joining the starry roster of names who had graced their other little number Les Misérables over the years of its burgeoning success. She graduated from Éponine to Fantine on Broadway and if her surprise appearance as Mrs Lovett in Old Friends was anything to go by (she had me completely fooled) she could even deliver a feisty Madame Thénardier.

Channelling Mrs Lovett in Old Friends (image credit: Danny Kaan)

Yes, on opening night of Old Friends I struggled to identify who was wielding the rolling pin and dropping the aitches with such aplomb. Could it really be the the same artist who had risen so magnificently to the high emotional stakes of ‘Loving You’ from Passion? A beautiful arrangement of a great song which shouldn’t have (but somehow did) achieve the accumulative impact it delivers in the context of the show.

Indeed, beyond its clear remit of celebrating a true master of Musical Theatre, Old Friends was a show that shouldn’t have worked in the way it did so triumphantly. Stephen Sondheim himself was always the first to point out that dramatic context was everything in his shows. The songs served the drama, not the other way around. There had to be a very good reason for them being there. But as Salonga points out to me, the younger generation (like her 17-year-old daughter) can reel off Sondheim songs like there is no tomorrow and if you really know the shows (as so many now do) you can ‘nerd out’ (Salonga’s phrase) on everything and instantly find yourself in the context of the show you know and love.

‘But Cameron also reminded us that we were honouring the shows but not actually doing the shows, so we had the freedom to take a little bit from the original context and then present it as its own thing. It’s really difficult thing to try to explain the conceit of this – but if you as an audience member know the source of these songs then you can bring something of their context to the table, and if not then you might hopefully be encouraged to find out where they came from and why they were there in the first place.

Lea Salonga as Éponine in Les Misérables on Broadway in 1993 (image credit: Michael le Poer Trench copyright CML)

‘The only piece of advice Julia McKenzie, who pretty much co-directed this with Matthew Bourne, gave me for ‘Loving You’ was that I was singing it to the person I most loved in the entire world. That was it. And that’s great for an actor to have the freedom to make and tell their own story with what is in this context a standalone song. I am not Fosca, this is not Passion, but I can turn myself into a kind of surrogate, you know, expressing and declaring love to a beloved of my own making.’

I put it to Salonga that Fosca is surely a role she must have in her sights – and she absolutely hasn’t ruled it out. She acknowledges how low it lies vocally – not in itself a problem for her, indeed something of an advantage when we’re talking eight shows a week – but, she says, what really fires her is walking that fine line between Fosca’s creepy obsession with Giorgio and the slow realisation of her unconditional love.

I remember some deeply unsettling laughter in the Broadway theatre where I first saw the show and I’ll never forget legendary book writer Arthur Laurents saying to me that the piece should have been called ‘Obsession’ not Passion. So easy to miss the point even if your name is Arthur Laurents.

I mention the wealth of experience that Salonga brought to the table when she auditioned for Miss Saigon – it would have been a big factor for Mackintosh, Nicholas Hytner, Boublil and Schönberg knowing that their already experienced young star would not be fazed by the weight of responsibility this hefty role demanded. She sang Éponine’s ‘On My Own’ for her first audition. Audacious. Later came ‘I’d Give My Life for You’. Checkmate.

Diversity. That’s a big word and one we can no longer conveniently shy away from. Happily, it is now a reality – and a priority – in the arts. And yet as late as 1992 the producers of a major Broadway revival of My Fair Lady refused to even see the Tony Award-winning Salonga for the title role because she was Asian. The disappointment she felt at the time was not easy to shake off. And, of course, there is a certain irony in the knowledge that Salonga grew up surrounded by VHS recordings of family favourites like The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins and that Julie Andrews was almost part of that family, such was her influence on the young Lea. She made her professional debut, aged seven, in The King and I thanks to a cousin with connections with Repertory Philippines and later graduated to the title role in Annie. A number of other American classics ensued and later came TV (her own show Love, Lea), albums and adulation. She was a child star in her own country. And, of course, no one was saying to her: ‘You can’t play this or that part because of your origins.’

When I listen to Salonga’s voice now, I hear a natural voice that has, like a great wine, marinated and matured over time – there is nothing in the least manufactured about it. For that, she credits the doyenne of singing coaches, Mary Hammond, who very much took her under her wing and worked on maximising what was already there. ‘She said to me, you have this natural tone and great instincts in how to use it. I don’t want to change that, I want to develop it as naturally as possible so you have a rock-solid technique you can totally rely on over an eight-performance week. What she absolutely didn’t want to do was change the way I sounded. I mean, what is the point of us all sounding the same anyway?!’

Just so. And that resilience that Hammond instilled was carried right through to the London run of Old Friends where at the time of our meeting she and Bernadette Peters hadn’t missed a single performance at the height of the colds and flu season.

Awards aplenty for Miss Saigon in London (1989)

But I wanted to touch upon another question which plays directly into the changing climate (in more ways than one) and our renewed awareness of sensibilities tied to race, gender and social responsibility. How to reinvent the core Musical Theatre repertoire in ways that are more in keeping with changing attitudes? In recent times we’ve seen the reimagined Oklahoma! and Sunset Boulevard and even back in 2002 Salonga was part of an attempt to revive a show that I’ve always adored (unreasonably) but that, even then, would have been deemed just ‘a little bit racist’ (to quote Avenue Q) and a lot sexist: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. This is a show essentially about the Westernisation of Chinese immigrants in the USA but even its wide-eyed good nature would likely have us gazing with embarrassment at the floor these days. David Henry Hwang (Tony Award-winning playwright of M Butterfly) was brought in to make major adjustments to the book (more often than not the Achilles’ heel of most Golden Age musicals) and still the show did not take flight a second time. Salonga, though, got to sing one of the great Rodgers and Hammerstein ballads, ‘Love, Look Away’, which was reattributed to her character this time around and must surely have been a factor in doing or not doing the show. Or maybe that’s me projecting? At this, she smiles. And we both almost in unison mention the verse of that song which is a mere two lines long and possibly the shortest in the entire repertoire. Salonga knows her stuff. Details like that are important to her.

Some shows, of course, grow more timely with age – like Flaherty and Ahrens’s Once on This Island which Salonga appeared in on Broadway in 2017 and which was ‘immersive’, in the sense of bringing the natural world into the theatre (goats and chickens and such like) at a time when saving the planet had become more and more urgent.

‘Yes, we certainly were timely,’ says Salonga, ‘but this was also a piece about the power of rebuilding. I’m not just talking bricks and mortar but people and attitudes, and even more importantly in this case the power of love.’

Happy on tour and having a direct relationship with the audience in Dream Again at the Royal Albert Hall (Image credit: Danny Kaan)

Not all revivals can take their cue in such a timely way and sometimes, surely, I say, we should simply be able to present classic shows in period as products of their time. Salonga agrees and comes up with a great example – another Sondheim lyric – which dates its show very precisely. It’s the song ‘Another Hundred People’ from Company and the line ‘Can we see each other Tuesday if it doesn’t rain / Look, I’ll call you in the morning or my service will explain.’ ‘My service will explain’? Remember answering services? That’s a classic Sondheim recollection of the 1970s that you don’t want to mess with. Details like that can give an entire show its context.

‘Another Hundred People’ is a number that Salonga often sings in concert – it’s New York City in a song, relentless, sweeping, unstoppable. The way it generates its energy through pulsing rhythm (of words and music) is testament to Sondheim’s genius. I wonder if it will feature in her upcoming tour Stage, Screen & Everything in Between which kicks off in late June in Wolverhampton? At the time of our meeting the final setlist is still some way off but Salonga’s head is teeming with ideas. I put it to her that there is real art in creating a set that is all of a piece. ‘I love that there is no fourth wall for these shows. I get to have a direct relationship with the audience, to tell my stories and to tell them through songs that I am free to pick from wherever I choose. I get my Musical Theatre kicks, I get my pop music kicks, and I get to fashion them into a narrative of my own making. To be surrounded by really great musicians, great arrangers, who will take a song and turn it into something that I don’t always expect, is always a thrill. Can’t wait.’

And, as part of that tour, Salonga also cannot wait to be back on the stage of the now lavishly refurbished Theatre Royal, Drury Lane where the show that changed her life premiered in 1989. It is fascinating to hear how unfazed and philosophical she was about the audition process that won her the role of Kim in Miss Saigon. Essentially, she wasn’t about to allow the fact that this was a life-changing opportunity to throw her off-balance. She may have been a celebrity in her home country but she was still a student at the time and life would go on whether she won the role or not. Level-headed or what? Paradoxically it was precisely that grounding and wealth of life experience at such a young age that gave her Kim such phenomenal strength and emotional clout.

I share with Salonga Claude-Michel Schönberg’s now well-worn remark that he had to thank Puccini twice for his career: first for writing Madam Butterfly and second for not writing Les Misérables which was at one point a very real possibility. In the event Puccini thought it ‘too complicated’. Phew.

I also mention my contention that Miss Saigon is actually a dramatic improvement on Madam Butterfly in the sense that Pinkerton never regards his marriage to the teenage Cio-Cio San as anything more than a fleeting fantasy in a far-off land, whereas Chris and Kim’s love is quickly a reality with a distinct future. ‘It’s the growing realisation of what that means which is so powerful. She knows what is expected of her at Dreamland. Chris is a business transaction. She gets that. She expects nothing more. She’s going to grab her things and go. And then his reaction is like, wait a minute, no. And then we’re on this spiral together and there can be no turning back.’

Returning to Les Mis in 2007, as Fantine (Image credit: Michael le Poer Trench copyright CML)

Picking up on that comment I add my thoughts that the genius of the show hinges on the flashback to the fall of Saigon in Act Two where we see in graphic re-enactment how the star-crossed lovers come to be torn apart. Moments like that are the very essence of music drama but then again – and Salonga concurs – the vision that Nicholas Hytner brought to the project took the piece from page to stage in the most magnificent way. Salonga will always remember the explosiveness of Dreamland at the top of the show – a fiery furnace of sweat and tears. She cites the way Hytner brought all the girls downstage like a mirror on the audience, all of them cowed and brought low and bathed in red light. I, in turn, will never forget the close of Act One where The Engineer, thinking Kim and her son Tam might be his passport to the USA, takes a long slow walk upstage to an uncertain future.

Speaking of The Engineer, I am curious to know Salonga’s thoughts on the gender-reversal recently played out by the excellent Joanna Ampil in Anthony Lau and Robert Hastie’s staging at the Sheffield Crucible. Might she be tempted to do a Michael Ball (as he did last year with Aspects of Love) and return older and wiser to the show which made her name in another guise? Now there’s a thought. She is plainly intrigued by it. And if my impressions of this talented and resourceful woman are anything to go by I’d say that nothing is ever off the table for Lea Salonga. When you’ve been at the top for as long as she has, never saying never is more often than not the way forward.

This article originally appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of Musicals magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today