Review: LEA SALONGA: STAGE, SCREEN & EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN, Theatre Royal Drury Lane

With a cry of “honey I’m home!”, international musical theatre icon Lea Salonga returns to the stage that launched her career over three decades ago.

Her Stage, Screen and Everything Inbetween tour will take her all around the UK from Bristol to Gateshead and Edinburgh but few venues will have quite the same emotional resonance. Drury Lane is where the groundbreaking Filipino singer and actress made her name in the debut run of Miss Saigon in 1989, originating the role of Kim and going on to win an Olivier for Best Actress in a Musical while still a teenager.

She followed the show to Broadway and this time added to her trophy cabinet another award and a piece of history as the first actress of Asian descent to win a Tony. And then there was her Eponine for Les Mis in 1993, first on the Great White Way then in the West End before Hollywood came calling.

Salonga was a bona fide musical theatre star when Disney asked her to play Princess Jasmine in Aladdin alongside Robin Williams as the Genie. The film’s “A Whole New World”, which she sang with Brad Kane,  went on to win a Golden Globe and an Oscar. She took on a very different Disney Princess in the title role of 1998’s Mulan before returning for the 2004 sequel, the imaginatively titled Mulan II. Last October, she returned to the London stage with fellow icon Bernadette Peters to belt out Stephen Sondheim numbers in Old Friends.

With such a rich catalogue of numbers to lean on, Salonga has garnered a wide body of fans over the decades. Dressed in a black trouser suit, she explains how Stage, Screen and Everything Inbetween is an exploration of her work in theatre, film and elsewhere and, over the course of two hours, delivers hit after hit, from Sondheim to Simple Minds and back again.

Musical theatre is her forte and she has a voice perfectly suited to the style of singing, emphasis and pronunciation required for that art form. She explores both her own past roles and those she played alongside and it is sheer joy to hear her roll out her favourites as well as some deep cuts. Hit after hit come flying our way from (obviously) Miss Saigon and Les Mis but also Waitress, The Greatest Showman, and Sweeney Todd. For the latter’s “By The Sea”, she displays a superb talent for mimicry, effecting a meaty East End accent which wouldn’t be out of place in the Queen Vic.

Watching this star on stage is a real treat which is often spoiled by the wall of twenty-something megawatt spotlights pointed straight at the audience from the back of the stage. Over the course of the evening, they rotate from gentle pastel colours through to eye-searing blasts of pure white; after five minutes, I regretted being born with working retinas and, after half an hour, I was prepared to reveal my darkest misdeeds. 

It is only when she moves away from her home territory that things go awry. Her medley of film soundtrack numbers demonstrate why few musical theatre stars make the jump from the stage to the silver screen as the clean purity of her voice and her faultless diction fails over and over again to convey the less clinical nature of her chosen songs.

While the Bee Gees sang “Saturday Night Fever” with the sheer falsetto joy of three chipmunks after a session on the laughing gas, Salonga’s jazzier laidback treatment comes across as from someone who has discovered that their favourite hors d'oeuvre is back on the menu at The Ivy. Her take on Simple Minds’ “(Don’t You) Forget About Me” has no edges and is, ironically, eminently forgettable. And her decision to assay the mountain that is “My Heart Will Go On” is an error of judgement: no-one has yet come close to how Celine Dion infuses perfect life into arguably the greatest ballad of the last half-century and any efforts to scale its heights are ultimately futile. 

The diva knows her audience well and, hopefully, they know her work just as well because she rarely has the gaucheness to introduce the songs by their names. Some of her introductions give big enough clues to let us lie back and slide into the expected melodies, others (“this is from a musical based on a film and was a hit on Broadway and the West End”) are a little more vague (brownie points to you if you guessed Waitress’ “She Used To Be Mine”). Only the songs from her Disney Princess era are announced beforehand and there are genuine goosebumps hearing them live. 

Salonga’s backing group, led by musical director, pianist and younger brother Gerard, ably support her throughout. Guitarist Chris Allard’s solo backing to a spine-tingling cover of Adele’s “Skyfall” is a genuine highlight but overall the band lacks the punch of the kind of live orchestra that would have backed the singer in her heyday. Using keyboards to synthesise the sounds of real instruments is a cheap effect, especially when especially the older musical theatre songs would have benefitted from some string players. Those hankering for her West End hits to be played in their original glory may have to wait until the next tour to get absolutely Everything.

Lea Salonga's Stage, Screen and Everything In Between continues on tour (see ticket link for more information).

Photo credit: Danny Kaan

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