Lea Salonga Is Never Getting Tired of Sondheim

Nobody doubted that Lea Salonga could sing.

She had won a Tony Award at the age of 20 for her breakout role as the besotted Vietnamese teen Kim in “Miss Saigon,” and sung her heart out as Éponine, and later Fantine, in Broadway productions of “Les Misérables.” She provided the crystalline vocals of not one but two Disney princesses: the warrior heroine of 1998’s “Mulan” and the magic carpet-riding Princess Jasmine in 1992’s “Aladdin.”

But could the singer handle Sondheim — a composer heralded for creating some of the most challenging, idiosyncratic work seen on the American stage — on Broadway? Could she inhabit a character like Momma Rose, the monstrous, pathologically ambitious stage mother from “Gypsy”? Or Mrs. Lovett from “Sweeney Todd,” the butcher/baker who breaks down the marketing challenges of hawking pies filled with human meat, in a Cockney accent, no less?

“Some of it’s hard,” Salonga admitted.

But she is doing all that and more in “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” currently playing at the Ahmanson Theater here in Los Angeles after a 16-week run in London’s West End. Scheduled to begin previews on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater next month, the show features more than three dozen songs from some of Sondheim’s biggest musicals, including “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “A Little Night Music” and “Into the Woods.” The tribute revue also stars Bernadette Peters, who, no stranger to Sondheim, put her own indelible stamp on the character of Momma Rose in 2003.

Salonga, Peters said, “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,” said the show’s producer Cameron Mackintosh, who also cast Salonga in “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables.”

“The real surprise was how funny she is,” he continued. “There weren’t that many laughs in ‘Miss Saigon’ or ‘Les Miz,’ obviously, so I didn’t know that side of her.”

The show marks Salonga’s return to the Center Theater Group in L.A., where she last appeared in David Henry Hwang’s 2001 revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Flower Drum Song.”

In many ways, that show was a leap of faith for her. The 1958 original hadn’t aged particularly well, with its mail-order brides and a musical tribute to diversity titled “Chop Suey.” And by that time in her career, Salonga could be choosy.

“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 said. “We were really lucky to get her.”

Salonga’s career has been like that: a combination of breakout performances (the first Asian Éponine and Fantine on Broadway) and leaps of faith, like “Flower Drum Song” and her recent role in “Here Lies Love,” which recast the tale of Imelda Marcos as a disco musical.

“I never thought I’d see that story on Broadway,” Salonga said.

In the process, she’s opened doors for others in the theater, as both an advocate, speaking out against racial discrimination in Hollywood and on Broadway, and as an example.

“She’s obviously been a big voice for diversity in casting from the very beginning,” said 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 recent morning, Salonga was in a restaurant overlooking the Ahmanson Theater, talking about some of her earliest days as a child star in her native Philippines, her breakout roles on Broadway, and her reunion with Mackintosh 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 Mackintosh in 1988, and was chosen to play Kim in the West End production of “Miss Saigon” after an extensive talent search. “Cameron likes to think he discovered her,” Bourne said with a laugh. “And in many ways, he did.”

But Salonga was already a star in the Philippines by the time Cameron came calling, having appeared in “The King and I” at 7 and as the star of “Annie” at 9. Concerned about whether Salonga, then 17, would be able to handle the pressure of singing in venues like London’s 2,000-seat Drury Lane Theater, Cameron asked her what sorts of crowds she had played for.

Three weeks earlier, she told him, she had opened for Stevie Wonder.

“At which point I said to myself, ‘Cameron, shut up,’” Mackintosh recalled.

“Miss Saigon” went on to become one of the world’s most popular musicals, playing for 10 years in London and securing Salonga a Laurence Olivier Award for best actress in a musical. But when the show was slated to come to Broadway in 1991, it ignited a firestorm for its yellowface casting of the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce in the role of the Engineer.

Salonga also came under fire from the Actors’ Equity Association, which felt that the part of Kim should go to an Asian American.

In the end, Salonga and Pryce were brought over for the Broadway run, both winning Tonys in the process. Salonga became the first Asian actress to win the award. “I was on cloud nine that night,” she said.

“And after Jonathan Pryce’s casting, which definitely was controversial, every single actor that got to play that role was of Asian descent,” she continued. “So that was a big victory for Asian actors.”

One of the most vocal protesters against the yellowface casting in “Miss Saigon” was Hwang, who even wrote a play about it, “Yellow Face,” which opened at the Mark Taper Forum in 2007 and played on Broadway last fall. When Hwang asked Salonga to star in his revival of “Flower Drum Song” in 2012, it was with that history in mind.

“We’ve talked about it,” he said. “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 later, in 2021, Salonga teamed up with Hwang again for #StopAsianHate, an online movement that arose in response to an upswell of anti-Asian hate crimes during 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 said. “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 production of “Here Lies Love” offered Salonga the chance to tell a story close to her heart: the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos and the beginnings of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines. The show also marked the first time Salonga got to play a Filipino on Broadway, headlining an all-Filipino cast.

“I’ve played Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, French twice,” she said. “Never Filipino. Our stories never made it to Broadway until then.”

Later that year, Mackintosh called upon Salonga to co-star in the West End production of “Old Friends.” “There was only a handful of people I thought could possibly co-star with Bernadette,” he said.

“Steve writes about the human condition,” Peters said. “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.”

Among Salonga’s concerns: doing justice to Mrs. Lovett’s Cockney accent in front of a house full of Londoners. She had performed the role of the serial killer’s accomplice and romantic partner in productions of “Sweeney Todd” in Manila and Singapore in 2019, but Drury Lane was something else.

“In London, I did not give myself any breathing room,” she said. “I needed to make sure I nailed it every day.”

“I’m a Londoner, and actually a real Cockney as well,” Bourne, the director, said. “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.”

After her run in Los Angeles and New York, Salonga will return to the Philippine musical stage for the first time in six years to do, yes, more Sondheim, starring as the Witch in “Into the Woods,” a role she played there three decades ago.

“I’m getting to do all kinds of Sondheim now,” she said. “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 continued. “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.”