Lea Salonga

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Lea Salonga

promotional photo of Lea
Origin Manila
Years active 1981–present
Genres OPM, R&B
Labels Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Pilipinas)

Lea Salonga-Chien (born on February 22, 1971 in Manila) is a Tony Award-winning actress from the Philippines who achieved international recognition for her portrayal of Kim, the lead role in the musical Miss Saigon. She is the first Asian to play Eponine in the musical Les Misérables on broadway. She is of Filipino descent.

On January 10, 2004, she married Robert Charles Chien, a Chinese-Japanese managing director of an entertainment software company. Their first daughter together, Nicole Beverly, was born on May 16, 2006.

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[edit] Early years

Lea Salonga was born Maria Lea Carmen Imutan Salonga to Feliciano Genuino Salonga and Ligaya Alcantara Imutan. She spent the first six years of her childhood in Angeles City, Pampanga, before moving to Manila.

[edit] Career

Salonga entered show business as a child star. At the age of seven, she made her professional debut in the Philippines by performing in the musical The King and I by Repertory Philippines. She became the lead star of 'Annie' and joined other productions, such as: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Fiddler on the Roof, The Rose Tattoo, The Sound Of Music, The Goodbye Girl, Paper Moon and The Fantasticks.

She began her recording career at the age of ten with her first album, Small Voice, which received a Gold certification. Her younger brother Gerard Salonga performed a duet with her with the song, Happiness. Since then he has collaborated her many other times as creative/production assistant. As a child star, she has also hosted her own musical television show, Love, Lea, and opened for Stevie Wonder during his 1998 concert in Manila. She won three Aliw Awards for Best Child Performer from 1981 to 1983. In 1983, her sophomore album, "Lea" was released. She was also part of German Moreno's teen variety show That's Entertainment. The young Lea also appeared with Herbert Bautista in several popular family-oriented Filipino films in the late 1980s such as Ninja Kids, Captain Barbell and Pik Pak Boom.

Salonga's biggest breakthrough came when she was selected to play the leading role of Kim in the musical Miss Saigon in 1989. The producers of the show scoured many Asian countries looking for a relatively unknown actress for the lead role of this major production. For her audition, Salonga chose to sing Boublil and Schönberg's " On My Own" from "Les Miserables," and was later made to sing "Sun and Moon" to test her voice quality's compatibility with the songs in the musical. The members of the panel were "bowled over" by Salonga's rendition of the songs. After Salonga and another actress (Monique Wilson) were tested with songs from the musical, Salonga was offered the role.

For her performance, Salonga was given the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical for the 1989/1990 season. From its original London home, Miss Saigon moved to Broadway in 1991. Salonga subsequently garnered the Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for the same role.

In 1993, Salonga played the role of street waif Eponine in the Broadway production of Les Misérables, then flew to Los Angeles to perform the song "A Whole New World" (of Disney's Aladdin) at the 65th Annual Academy Awards, where the song won an Oscar. (Salonga sang the song in the movie as the singing voice of Princess Jasmine.) In the same year she released her self-titled international debut album with Atlantic Records, which sold slowly in the USA but went platinum in the Philippines and sold 3 million copies worldwide.[1]

In 1995 Salonga performed as Geri Riordan, an 18-year old adopted Vietnamese-American child in the movie Redwood Curtain, which starred John Lithgow and Jeff Daniels.

Salonga was invited by Sir Cameron Mackintosh to play the role of Eponine for the 10th Anniversary concert of "Les Miserables" at London's Royal Albert Hall. Salonga performed as part of a "dream cast" composed of Colm Wilkinson, Michael Ball, Judy Kuhn, and Philip Quast.

Salonga then acted in various musical theater productions around the Philippines and Singapore. She notably starred as Sandy in Grease, Sonia Walsk in They're Playing Our Song, The Witch in Into The Woods, and Lizzie in Baby. In 1997, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" (recordings from her childhood days) was released to gold sales in the Philippines. It was followed up by "Lea... In Love" in 1998. "By Heart" followed two years later, both albums reaching multiple platinum status in the Philippines. [2]

In 2001, Salonga had a grand homecoming via the Manila production of Miss Saigon staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

In 2001 and again in 2003, Salonga played the role of Lien Hughes on the soap opera As the World Turns, which was originally played by Ming-Na Wen many years before. She also made a guest appearance in the medical drama E.R., playing the role of a patient with Lymphoma.

In 2002 Salonga returned to broadway to play the role of a Chinese immigrant in a reinterpretation of Rogers and Hammerstein's "Flower Drum Song" opposite Jose Llana. The show was given a brand new libretto which presented Asian Americans with more dignity than the original but it also played with the stereotypes. It was considered one of the 10 best plays on Broadway in 2002 by Time Magazine [3]. The musical, which had a short run on Broadway, later on garnered nominations for best book, best costume designer and best choreographer. However, Ms. Salonga's performance, which received mixed-positive reviews, was not nominated at the Tony's.

In February and March 2005, Salonga played her first US concert tour in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlantic City, and Chicago. Dates in Washington, D.C., and Norfolk, Virginia followed in July 2005. Some of the venues sold out one week and a half after the concerts were announced.

On November 7, 2005, Salonga performed with a 26-piece ensemble to a sold out crowd of 2,804 at the "Isaac Stern Hall," the Main Hall in New York's prestigious Carnegie Hall for the benefit of Diverse City Theater Company. Salonga is only the third Filipino solo artist to perform at the venue (the first was Regine Velasquez followed by Jose Mari Chan).

Salonga's Disney film credits include the singing voice of Princess Jasmine for Aladdin (1992), and Fa Mulan for Mulan (1998), as well as the voice of Mrs. Kusakabe (Satsuki and Mei's mother) in Disney's 2005 English dub of Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro.

Salonga performed three times for U.S. Presidents (she was invited twice to the White House and the other one was on President Bush's state visit to the Philippines) and once for Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. In the field of theater, no other Filipino has achieved greater international recognition than Salonga. She is the only one to ever win a Tony.


[edit] Filipino Music Awards

  • 1986: Best Female R&B Vocal Album of the Year, Lea
  • 1993: Best Female Pop Vocal Album of the Year, Lea Salonga
  • 1993: Best Female R&B Vocal Album of the Year, Lea Salonga
  • 1993: Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, Every Time We Fall
  • 1999: Best Vocal Performance of the Year Duo/Group, I Don't Love You Anymore with Ariel Rivera
Preceded by
Tyne Daly
for Gypsy		 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical
1991
for Miss Saigon		 Succeeded by
Faith Prince
for Guys and Dolls

[edit] External Links

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