Interview: LEA SALONGA at UA-Pulaski Tech CHARTS

It's so refreshing when an Icon is as delightful and charming as Lea Salonga. She has been famous for most of her life through her work on stage and screen but makes you feel like you are the most important person in the world as you speak to her. She has just embarked on her Dream Again North American tour and yet, she took some time to answer a few questions for BroadwayWorld.com. This is her first tour since 2019 and you can see for yourself, why she's a Legend, enjoy.

Have you ever been to Arkansas?

Part of me says I may have, in a previous performance but I honestly don't know.

I know you have met one of our most famous Arkansans, former President Bill Clinton.

Yes I have. I remember him being very tall and charismatic and very handsome. My mom was totally fainting when she met him.

When you perform in a place that you haven't been, do you have time to sightsee or try local foods or anything like that?

Unfortunately not. While I'm on this tour, we have taken it upon ourselves to stay in our little Covid bubble. Just being a singer, I'm susceptible to any sort of upper respiratory pathogen that might be floating anywhere and this is even pre-Covid. So whenever I travel, I take it upon myself to stay away from people and stay healthy. But towards the end of a tour, that's when I allow myself a little more liberty and freedom to go around a little bit because the tour's ending. If I catch something within 3 days, that's okay because the tour's ending.

When you go into a new area to perform, do you try and get some facts or information about the location so that during the show you can bring it up to the audience?

I try to but the show is pretty much set to be what it is. Sometimes in conversation or if I pick up something within earshot, I try to glean from that something and it can end up in the show.

Is there anything you do to get in shape for the physical demands of a tour?

The funny thing is I've been filming a tv show in New York and some of the stuff I do can be physical. Even just walking from the trailer to the set, that can take up a good amount of time. As far as anything rigorous, no, but I've found that I've been able to retain a lot of my singing stamina. We had our first show in Winnipeg about a week ago and I was surprised, "Oh, my body remembers how to do this." I didn't feel overly fatigued. Sure, I did feel some fatigue because it's a physical act and there is a lot of my body involved when I do sing. I was surprised that I was able to keep a lot of it. I don't dance on stage and I tell myself, "Let's just focus on the singing, keep the physical stuff to a minimum and just focus on telling your stories and being vocally and technically correct." In doing that, I've been able to sound as strong as I have on previous tours. It was also helpful that I was singing through the pandemic whether it was an online concert or a corporate event or live stream or just being asked to sing for whatever event. I think that was really helpful for me mentally as well as physically. It never really disappeared because I would have to sing 3 or 4 songs for a gig. I always recorded at home. If I didn't do it right the first time, I would have to do a retake. So I think my body never really had a chance to go to zero.

What is your favorite part of touring?

Well, packing and unpacking is not a favorite thing. Both my daughter, (Nicole) who's with me on this tour, and I have been able to figure out what we need to bring, what we need to leave behind. Figuring out the laundry situation and we've just gotten so good at it. So, I think my favorite part is, I won't include the performance because that's a given. I think it's when we arrive in a brand new city and arriving in a car and looking outside and seeing how beautiful these cities are. It has been a few years. The last tour I did was in 2019, so to be able to travel the U.S. and Canada and see how different each city is from each other. To sit and see the beauty of it, whether it's a rainy day or it's a sunny day and "Oh my God, the mountains, they're so beautiful and the snow on top of the mountains. Oh, the city is really so nicely constructed and well laid out." Just being able to appreciate where we are in that moment. Of course my favorite part is walking into a theater and testing the acoustics of a concert hall or trying to figure out the challenges of a hall that may not be built for concerts. Then getting over the challenge of what our onstage sound situation is like. Sometimes the smaller places are easier to manage as far as sound. Bigger places can be a little more dicey depending on how they are constructed and the materials with which the walls are made. I've been in concert halls and normally when they say concert halls, I know I will not need inner ear monitors. There have been places where I'll walk in and the slap back from the house is just so intense and confusing. It will come back a minute or so later and it's like "why does this feel like a stadium. Why does this feel like an arena? This does not feel like a concert hall." So the sound engineer says, " I have transmitters, do you have inner ear monitors?" Then I say, "Yes, please, you just saved my life." I usually opt out of using them because I like the natural acoustics of a hall but if I don't have a choice then I use them and it's a life saver.

Do you have any rituals or things you do for luck before a performance?

I say a prayer before I walk out. I was raised Catholic so I make the sign of the cross before I walk out onstage. My manager, Josh Pultz, pages the curtain to let me out. There was a Bob's Burgers episode that I saw and one character, the youngest daughter, said something in the show, " Namaste, you Son of a B****". So I told him about it and now it's become our ritual. Before I step out, before they announce my name, he says to me, looking me dead in the eye, "Namaste, you Son of a B****". Then I walk out. I have to thank Bob's Burgers for that.

What are your thoughts on Proshot Broadway shows like Hamilton being available on streaming? Is that a good thing, bad thing and why?

I don't think it's a bad thing because it makes these shows accessible to people that may not otherwise be able to go to New York. First of all, allow me to say that watching say, Hamilton on stage when you're in the same room as all of these performers versus watching it on DisneyPlus is two very distinct, separate, very different experiences one from the other. The energy of being in the actual house, you cannot replicate that. Sure you can record the applause, you can record the performances but you cannot replicate that energy. So if anything else, I'd like to think that watching the show on DisneyPlus, in the case of Hamilton, will only whet the appetite of the person watching it on their tv to actually want to come and watch it live and in person when a tour comes through. Then they have to save up and see that because you are just surrounded by the energy of the audience and you're also getting so much energy from the stage. Which replicates that over and over again over the span of 3 hours and there's just nothing like it. So I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing because it allows access into an experience that a person may or may not be able to have. You know, if they are growing up somewhere in the middle of the country and they are unable to get to New York for whatever reason but they have access to Broadway On Demand. Or if the shows are like Hamilton on DisneyPlus, you at least get the experience of it. It's not the same obviously but I'm not going to be this theatre snob and say "Musical theatre is the exclusive domain of the theater." Sometimes the first experience for a lot of people with musicals will be, say the Sound of Music on film or West Side Story with Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer and Rita Moreno or this new West Side Story which people are going crazy over because it's fantastic. So there will never ever be an experience like watching a musical in a theater and musical theatre is a very unique art form. I'm all for people accessing it and having access to it but I'm also hoping these same people will figure out a way to find a way of watching a theatre show in an actual theater because there is nothing like it.

For high school students, especially students of color, to see a show like Hamilton where people are singing and dancing, it makes a difference.

Being able to see yourself onstage, seeing yourself represented in some way, it does something. It opens your mind to the possibility that the things you thought were never possible for yourself, all of a sudden, "Oh my gosh, I'll be able to do this." It's really important. The world of possibilities increases.

What is your idea of a perfect day when you're not working?

Sleeping. Catching up on sleep. Trying to find my friends and texting them. I just discovered Wordle and my manager, one of my best friends and I, we sort of, not really compete but we share our attempts for that day. You know, how many did it take you to get to this one? Sometimes it's 2, sometimes it's 4, sometimes it's all 6 turns. On the tv show that I'm currently filming, Pretty Little Liars, one of the young women introduced me to this thing called Octordle which is solving 8 Wordle puzzles at the same time. It's insane and sometimes it takes a full day to get through it. I have enough of a tough time getting through the six, do I really want to multiply this hardship by 8?

Lea Salonga will be in North Little Rock April 25th at 7:30 pm. Get tickets at https://leasalonga.com/calendar or https://uaptc.universitytickets.com/ or by calling the UAPTC Box Office at 501-812-2831.

Photo Credit: Raymund Issac

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