Lea Salonga, icon of musical theater and two-time Disney princess, walks through the lobby of the Theater Royal in London’s Drury Lane as stage and screen legend Rita Moreno emerges from the auditorium.
Salonga, the first Asian female artist to win a Tony award and one of the youngest artists to take home an Olivier after portraying the role of Kim in 1989’s Miss Saigon at the age of 18, welcomes Moreno, the first Latin American to win an Oscar. The two embrace before saying goodbye. Just last week, Salonga said, they were sipping champagne after watching Moreno in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends down the road in Gielgud.
Later, Michael Ball walks past Salonga, calling her “molasses” and hugging her as he reminisces about playing Éponine to her Marius in 1990’s Les Misérables: “I died in her arms,” he smiles. This summer, 35 years after the opening of Miss Saigon, Salonga returns to Drury Lane for her UK tour Stage, Screen & Everything in Between.
But for all her showbiz friends, big bills and a voice instantly recognizable from Disney classics like Princess Jasmine’s A Whole New World and Mulan’s Reflection, Salonga is a remarkably humble star.
“This was our first stop after the airport,” he recalls of arriving in London after producer Cameron Mackintosh invited him to leave local stardom and a “normal” education in the Philippines to come to the West Coast. “Our luggage was left inside the bus, so our label manager went with my mother to Laura Ashley’s and picked up a few things. I had no make-up, had major jet lag, and it was in the newspapers that I had my photo taken outside the stage door.”
International stardom followed. Salonga, now 52 and diminutive with a pixie cut, describes how different it felt to walk into Drury Lane back then: “I wasn’t too aware of what this theater was, what it meant, who had been here before. This was the beginning of many things. When I first came, I was a pre-med student in college, and I thought, ‘After my time on the show, I’m going to come home and pick up the phone.’ [my studies].’” During a visit to the church during Miss Saigon’s run, when the priest talked about “gifts,” she realized: “No, that’s not happening.”
I was a pre-med student in college when Miss Saigon started. After my time on the show, I thought I would return home and continue my studies.
Salonga was comfortable performing from a young age. “It always felt safe,” he says of the scene. “It never felt like a scary place. Even though I was going through a personal problem, being on stage and living in another character for a few hours always gave me a feeling of relief.” He made his professional debut in The King and I was seven, he recorded his first album when I was 10 and we opened for Stevie Wonder in 1988 when I was 17. That same year he was sent by the singers union to meet Mackintosh. “Cameron asked me: ‘How many audiences have you performed to?’ I thought: ‘Well, I just opened up to 10,000 people.’ They wanted to know if I was afraid of the possibility of 2,500. “I answered your questions.”
Playing the role of Kim, the leading lady in a cross-cultural love story during the Vietnam War, first in the West End and then on Broadway, was a big moment for representation in theatre. However, despite its success, the series faced accusations of racism that never fully disappeared. Bad press initially centered around the casting of white British actor Jonathan Pryce, who wore facial prosthetics and make-up to alter his skin tone to appear as the series’ half-Vietnamese villain. Later, when it transferred to Broadway, the U.S. Actors’ Equity Association filed a motion to block Salonga from reprising the role, preferring to prioritize Asian-American performers. Mackintosh claimed it had failed to find a satisfactory replacement, but an arbitration award had to be made against the union before Salonga was allowed to retain the role.
She repaid Mackintosh’s loyalty by awarding Tony the award for best actress in a musical, and their partnership continued two years later when she chose Tony to play Eponine, re-establishing the role still played by black women in the West End.
“I don’t think either of us realized how powerful, how far-reaching this decision would be. Soon I heard other young women say: ‘It made me realize that me, who looks like you, can do what you do’. So if this was one of those touchstone moments that helped move the needle forward, then I’m glad I was even a small part of it. ‘Okay, I did it, who will race next?’ “I have a pay-the-price approach.”
She pushed the needle again when Disney called and invited her to sing as Disney’s first black princess, Jasmine, in Aladdin in 1992, then as Chinese warrior Mulan in 1998. Although these women did not share Salonga’s Filipino roots, their Asian status was emblematic of the changing landscape in the entertainment industry. Salonga is proud of her heritage: “When you see little girls of all races, colors and creeds dressing up as Mulan or Jasmine for Halloween, it’s like, ‘Oh my God.’ “You realize that those two minutes of singing in this movie make a lasting impression and impact.”
Still pinching myself I was on the production team of a Broadway show that featured an entire cast of Filipino descent
A Whole New World won an Oscar — Salonga performed at the ceremony — and a Golden Globe, but if she could only choose one, would it be Jasmine or Mulan? “Mulan. It’s the movie where I look at the screen and say, ‘He looks like me, and I look like him.’
Disney is where most people know him. “It’s very broad-ranging compared to musical theatre,” he says. But the stage performances touch on nearly every musical in the canon; She was a judge on the reality show The Voice of the Philippines, and last summer she co-produced and starred for five weeks in Here Lies Love, the dance-pop Imelda Marcos musical created by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. An all-Filipino cast. “I still pinch myself that I was on the production team. When I was cast in Miss Saigon, I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime; that the entire cast of a Broadway show is made up of people of Filipino descent.”
In 2021, Salonga and her child Nic, who shares her mother’s musical talent, moved to New York, a decision made out of a desire to help “make this life less crazy” for her child. “I’m raising a 17-year-old gay kid and it’s not the easiest thing because they’re trying to understand what it means, so I’m trying to open up my own understanding,” he says. “I wanted them to be somewhere where you could navigate as a human being and figure out where you could fit in without feeling like there was a monkey behind you all the time.”
It’s these kinds of personal experiences that lead Salonga to choose what to use as platforms on the internet; She highlights queer causes, anti-Asian racism, and domestic abuse to her 1 million Instagram followers and 5 million followers on X.
“I had relatives who were subjected to violence by their spouses. I would hear my mother say: ‘What happened to you?’ and she would say, ‘I got hit with a fist.’ When you grow up and hear these stories… I feel the need to highlight this.
“In 2016 [Trump’s] I felt like in the election a lot of people were given permission to hate others, especially people of a certain color in a part of the world that includes me. I’m lucky that I’ve never encountered anyone insulting me or spitting at me, but walking around New York City felt like an exercise in hyper-awareness. Even if nothing happens to you, it is very tiring to return to the safety of your apartment and feel like it is a very difficult process.”
His eight-venue tour, including a night at Drury Lane, is “a dream come true”. “We’ll definitely have Sondheim, some pop music, Disney, Miss Saigon, especially here, but maybe not what I say,” he says. “I remember doing the show and being jealous of other people and their music. Now that it’s been over 30 years, I can pick and choose.”
Thirty years later, the industry looks different, too: “There are more people of color behind the scenes where we need to be: directors, producers. I don’t know how far we’ve come at the top because the positions of really great power are still mostly occupied by white people. With producers like Clint Ramos [with whom she worked on Here Lies Love] and writers like Lin-Manuel Miranda; For her to continue pushing needles in her own way, and for all these black people, people like Rita Morena, who we met, who was pushing needles herself…”
Salonga recalled the night Moreno won the Oscar for best supporting actress for West Side Story and her girlfriends outside the awards venue chanting “she did it!” she continues with a story she told about yelling. because they saw themselves in him.
Surely the same was true for Kim, Éponine, Jasmine and Mulan? “Yes, I think it was: ‘It’s possible.’”
Lea S.getonga: Stage, Screen and Everything in Between is Touring from June 21 to July 1; The tour starts in Wolverhampton.