Lea Salonga is a little out of breath. She just finished a walk through Central Park. But she doesn’t need a minute because, despite a slightly elevated heart rate, she’s ready to chat. “I got my steps in. It was a beautiful day, and it’s great to clear your head that way. So I’m in a good place,” she tells Broadway Direct over video from her New York City apartment.
Salonga was coming home from her child’s spring assembly at school. Now the two have the whole week to spend together since it’s spring break. He’s off from school and so is she, having just returned from Los Angeles, performing for the last month in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends at the Ahmanson Theatre. “Right now we’re all in vacation mode-ish,” Salonga says, admitting this interview is an exception — though she’s never one to shy away from doing press. “Kind of returning back to being the mama in the household is fine, and that’s fun.”
Performances resume for the Broadway premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre on March 25. The musical revue was originally conceived by legendary producer Cameron Mackintosh, with Stephen Sondheim’s blessing, as a one-night-only London concert in May 2022. Sondheim, whose musicals range from Gypsy and West Side Story to Sunday in the Park With George, Into the Woods, and Passion, died during its development in November 2021. The revue was then turned into a stage show with a longer run, first at London’s Gielgud Theatre in the fall of 2024, then in L.A., and now on Broadway.
Bernadette Peters costars alongside Salonga, and they begin the show together singing Company’s “Side by Side” dressed in “Sondheim red” costumes.
“Surreal” is how Salonga describes the moment she holds hands with the three-time Tony Award winner, last on Broadway seven years ago as Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!
“It certainly was not on my bingo card when I was 10,” says Salonga, who grew up performing in the Philippines and is famously known as the singing voice of Jasmine in Disney’s Aladdin and the title role in Mulan, as well as her Tony Award–winning role as Kim in Broadway’s Miss Saigon. As a kid, Salonga watched Peters in Annie opposite Carol Burnett and Tim Curry. “It was not even a thought that this would be my future, that I would actually get to hold her hand and get to sing with her.”
Even though Salonga and Peters were briefly on Broadway the same time — Salonga in Les Misérables and Peters in The Goodbye Girl in March 1993 — they didn’t meet until 1998 during a London concert performance of Hey, Mr. Producer! honoring Mackintosh, who in some ways discovered Salonga for Miss Saigon.
In Old Friends, Salonga sings part of “Not a Day Goes By” from Merrily We Roll Along. The gut-wrenching song about a dissolving marriage, most recently performed by Katie Rose Clarke in the record-breaking Tony Award–winning revival last year, has been a staple for Peters over the past several decades. “I remember learning that song, listening to [Peters], not having heard the original cast album of Merrily We Roll Along, playing it over and over and over because I needed to learn it for a concert. I still have her voice in my head when I’m singing the lines from the song that I’ve been assigned,” Salonga admits.
Salonga also sings “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” from Gypsy, famously sung by Rose, a role Peters portrayed and also secured a Tony nomination for in 2003. Audra McDonald currently performs the iconic role in the latest revival of the 1959 musical, playing at the Majestic Theatre. Mama Rose, in the Act One closer, makes a promise to her neglected older daughter, Louise, that it’s her turn to become a star after her talented younger daughter, June, runs away. Salonga pulls from her own youth to belt out Sondheim’s famous lyrics.
“I’d like to think that because Cameron knows my history and knows of my mother’s determination and how she was, in her own way, a stage mother without really being a stage mother, I think he felt that I would be the right person for that song,” Salonga says. Mackintosh had no notes for her performance during the rehearsal process. “I think his whole thinking was, this woman knows what this is, therefore, I am not going to get in her way. And he never did, which I’m thankful for.”
For Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration in April 2020, right after the pandemic shutdown began, Salonga chose to sing “Loving You” from Passion. After the virtual tribute concert, she was shocked to receive a special email from the birthday boy, who wrote something along the lines of “Thank you. It was moving.” “I’m like, You are 90. You do not have to tell me that you thought it was moving. You can just sit back, relax, and do a big blanket thank-you to everybody in one email,” Salonga relays.
That email was her most personalized interaction with the composer other than meeting him once in passing during the Hey, Mr. Producer! concert. So it’s not lost on Salonga that she was asked to perform “Loving You” in Old Friends. “It fell on my lap,” she says, noting that Mackintosh picked what she sings, including “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods.
“It’s always really special when Bernadette comes at the end of it and she kind of finishes the song,” Salonga says of the moments before the pair sings the final few notes together. “I always thought it was really special, because here’s the lady who’s the original Witch and she’s tailing the song.”
What’s even more special is, after the limited run ends on June 1, Salonga is headed back to the Philippines to play the Witch herself at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater in Makati.
Salonga is preparing to ask Peters numerous questions about the character and the show at length — but not just yet.
“I’m not in the current headspace to come up with thoughtful questions for her. I wanted to be able to really give it a think,” she says, wanting to get into a solid routine with Old Friends first. “She knows that I’m going to come to her and come at her with a lot of questions regarding what it was like to create this character, what this role means to her, what it meant to her at the time, what it would mean to her now.”
Salonga’s child, Nic, is playing Jack in the production, bringing even more depth to “Children Will Listen.”
“As a parent, I have to be mindful of what I say, how I behave around my kid. Whether we are artists or doctors or businesspeople or politicians, there are younger people who are waiting in the wings, watching how we do what it is that we do,” advises Salonga.
And then she hangs up to spend the quiet week with her child.
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is now playing and was just extended through Sunday, June 15, 2025.