Lea Salonga, icon of musical theatre and a Disney princess twice over, is walking through the lobby of the Theatre Royal on London’s Drury Lane when the stage-and-screen legend Rita Moreno appears from the auditorium.
Salonga, the first female Asian performer to win a Tony and among the youngest to take home an Olivier after originating the role of Kim in Miss Saigon in 1989 aged 18, throws open her arms to Moreno, the first Latina to win an Oscar. The pair embrace before saying goodbye. Just last week, Salonga tells me, they were sipping champagne after Moreno watched her in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, down the road at the Gielgud.
Later, Michael Ball will pass by, calling Salonga “treacle” and hugging her, as she reminisces about playing Éponine to his Marius in Les Misérables in the 1990s: “I died in his arms,” she smiles. This summer, 35 years after Miss Saigon opened, Salonga returns to Drury Lane, for her UK tour, Stage, Screen & Everything in Between.
But for all the showbusiness friends, top billings and a voice instantly recognisable from such Disney classics as Princess Jasmine’s A Whole New World and Mulan’s Reflection, Salonga is a most unassuming star.
“This was our first stop from the airport,” she remembers of arriving in London after the producer Cameron Mackintosh invited her to leave domestic stardom and a “normal” upbringing in the Philippines and come to the West End. “Our suitcases were buried in the bus, so our company manager went with my mom to Laura Ashley and grabbed a couple of things. I had no makeup, major jetlag and had photographs taken outside the stage door that came out in the papers.”
International stardom followed. Salonga, now 52, diminutive with a pixie cut, reflects on how different it felt walking into Drury Lane then: “I was not super aware of what this theatre was, what it meant, who had been here before. It was the start of a lot of things. When I first came I was a pre-med student in uni and I thought: ‘After my time in the show I will go back home and pick up [my studies].’” It was a visit to church, during Miss Saigon’s run, where the priest spoke about “gifts” that she realised: “No, that’s not happening.”
Salonga was comfortable performing from a young age. “It always felt safe,” she says of the stage. “It never felt like a space to be afraid of. Even if I was going through some sort of personal issue, being on stage, inhabiting another character for a couple of hours always felt like relief.” She made her professional debut in The King and I, aged seven, recorded her first album at 10 and, in 1988, aged 17, opened for Stevie Wonder. That same year, she was sent by the singers’ union to meet Mackintosh. “Cameron asked me: ‘What size audiences have you performed for?’ I was like: ‘Well, I just opened for 10,000 people.’ They wanted to find out if I was intimidated at the prospect of 2,500. I’d answered their question.”
Being cast as Kim – the lead in the story of cross-cultural love during the Vietnam war – in the West End, then on Broadway, was a huge moment for representation in theatre. However, the show faced accusations of racism that, despite its success, have never truly gone away. Bad press initially centred around the casting of white English actor Jonathan Pryce, who wore facial prosthetics and makeup to alter his skin tone, in order to pass as the show’s half-Vietnamese villain. Then, on its transfer to Broadway, the US Actors’ Equity Association bid to stop Salonga reprising her role, preferring to prioritise Asian-American performers. Mackintosh claimed he could not find a satisfactory replacement but it required an arbitrator ruling against the union before Salonga was allowed to keep the part.
She repaid Mackintosh’s loyalty with a Tony for best actress in a musical and their partnership continued when he chose her to play Éponine two years later, re-establishing a role that, in the West End, is still played by women of colour.
“I don’t think either of us were aware of how powerful, how far-reaching, that decision would be. That was not until much later where I heard other young women saying: ‘Me, looking like you, made me realise I could do what you’re doing’. So if that became one of those touchstone moments that helped to move the needle forward then I’m glad to have been even a little part of it. I have a pay it forward attitude of: ‘OK I’ve done it, whose gonna run with it next?’”
When Disney called, inviting her to sing as Jasmine, Disney’s first princess of colour, in Aladdin in 1992, then the Chinese warrior Mulan in 1998, she pushed the needle on again. While these women did not share Salonga’s Filipina descent, that they were Asian at all was emblematic of a shifting landscape in the entertainment industry. Salonga is proud of their legacy: “When you see little girls of every race, colour and creed dress up as Mulan or Jasmine for Halloween it’s like: ‘Oh my God’. It hits you that those two minutes of singing in this movie had some sort of lasting impact and influence.”
A Whole New World won an Oscar – Salonga performed at the ceremony – and a Golden Globe, but if she could choose only one, would it be Jasmine or Mulan? “Mulan. It’s the one where I look at the screen and say: ‘She looks like me, I look like her.’”
It is Disney that most people know her for. “It’s just so far-reaching compared with musical theatre,” she says. But her stage performances touch almost every musical in the canon; she has been a judge on the reality show The Voice of the Philippines and, last summer, co-produced and, for five weeks starred in, Here Lies Love, the dance-pop Imelda Marcos musical created by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, with an all-Filipino cast. “I still pinch myself that I was on the producing team. When I was cast in Miss Saigon I never thought I would see that in my lifetime – an entire cast of a Broadway show made up of folks of Filipino descent.”
In 2021, Salonga and her child, Nic – who shares their mother’s musical talent – moved to New York, a decision driven by a desire to help “make this life less crazy” for her child. “I am raising a queer 17-year-old and it’s not the easiest thing because they’re trying to navigate what this means, so I try to open up my own understanding,” she says. “I wanted them to be in a place you can navigate as a human being and figure out where you can fit in without always feeling there is this monkey on your back.”
It is these sorts of personal experiences that steer Salonga to choose what she platforms online, spotlighting queer causes, anti-Asian racism and domestic abuse to 1 million Instagram followers and 5 million on X.
“I’ve had relatives who were abused by their husbands. I’d hear my mother say: ‘What happened to you?’ and she’d say, ‘I collided with a fist’. When you grow up and hear those stories … I feel the need to spotlight it.
“In 2016 with [Trump’s] election I felt so many people were given permission to hate others, especially people of a particular colour from a part of the world that includes me. I’m lucky in that I never got anyone shouting slurs or spitting at me, but walking around New York City felt like an exercise in hyper-awareness. It’s exhausting to get back into the safety of your apartment and feel like that was quite the ordeal, even if nothing happens to you.”
Her tour, which takes in eight venues including one night at Drury Lane, is “a dream come true”. “We’ll definitely have Sondheim, some pop music, Disney, Miss Saigon, especially here, but it might not be the ones I sang,” she says. “I remember doing the show and being envious of other people and their music. Now it’s 30-plus years on, I can pick and choose.”
After three decades, the industry looks different, too: “There are more people of colour behind the scenes, where we need to be: directors, producers. In the upper echelons, I don’t know how far we’ve gotten because the positions of really great power are still occupied mostly by white folks. With producers like Clint Ramos [with whom she worked on Here Lies Love] and writers like Lin-Manuel Miranda; for him to also keep pushing needles in his own way and for all of these people of colour, people like Rita Morena who we bumped into, who was also pushing needles …”
Salonga tails off into a story that Moreno relayed about the night she won the Oscar for best supporting actress for West Side Story, and her girlfriends, outside the awards venue, screaming “she did it!” because they saw themselves in her.
Surely the same was true of Kim, Éponine, Jasmine and Mulan? “Yes I think it was that: ‘It’s possible.’”
Lea Salonga: Stage, Screen & Everything in Between is touring 21 June to 1 July; tour starts Wolverhampton.
