Lea Salonga on tackling her first Filipino play: ‘You gotta do something that scares you’

MANILA — Lea Salonga has spent much of her celebrated career singing her way through some of musical theater’s most demanding roles. Her next challenge, however, will require her to put aside the songs and confront a formidable matriarch entirely in Filipino.

The Tony Award-winning actress will star as Bernarda Alba in Theatre Group Asia’s (TGA) Philippine staging of “Ang Tahanan ni Bernarda Alba,” a Filipino-language adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s drama about a domineering mother whose efforts to protect her family ultimately threaten to destroy it.

For Salonga, 55, the production marks her first time performing in a Filipino play — an opportunity that excites her even as it pushes her beyond familiar artistic territory.

“I guess this is the first time anyone ever asked me to do a Filipino play,” Salonga said in an exclusive interview with ABS-CBN News.

The language was her first hurdle.

“When Clint Ramos first posed the question, if this was something that would interest me, and if it’s something that I would do, the language was the first layer that I had to get past in order to say yes,” she said.

But after going through her portions of the script with playwright Guelan Valera Luarca, who translated the play into Filipino, Salonga began to see a way into the role.

“It was like, ‘Oh, I can access this in my brain. I think I’ll be able to do this,’” she said. “But he seems to have faith, so, all right, another person has faith in me.”

The play, adapted and directed by Chay Yew, follows Bernarda after the death of her second husband, when she imposes eight years of mourning and absolute obedience on her five daughters. In the closed confines of their home, tradition, discipline and the need to preserve appearances collide with the women’s desires for love, independence and lives of their own.

Playing such a character presents another challenge for Salonga, who must inhabit a woman whose authority is enforced through fear rather than affection. “She is a tyrant,” Salonga said. “It’s like, ‘Can I do this, to play somebody who rules home in the way that she does?’”

She eventually found a way to approach the character by drawing on people she has encountered. “And then I figured, oh, wait, I actually know people like this. I can just draw upon that,” she said.

Salonga acknowledged that some aspects of Bernarda’s fiercely protective nature might resonate with her own experiences growing up. Asked whether her mother was similarly controlling, she said the comparison was not entirely accurate, although she recognized elements of her mother’s protectiveness.

“There are parts of that that I’m actually thankful for in light of a lot of things going on in the world at the moment,” she said.

Understanding Bernarda, however, will require more than identifying familiar traits. Salonga is interested in exploring how a woman who presumably wants to protect her children reaches a point where her rules become oppressive.

The character’s rigid ideas about class and respectability also offer another avenue for exploration. Salonga noted that Bernarda’s social aspirations might be informed by a desire to identify with the colonizer, a tension that could surface in the actress’ interpretation of the role.

“There’s this phenomenon in the U.S. where it’s like accessibility to whiteness,” she said. “So I think that there’s a little bit of that that I can also explore in building this character. It’s kind of fun.”

Although Lorca’s play was written in the 1930s and is set in Spain, Salonga believes its concerns remain relevant, particularly when viewed through a Filipino cultural lens.

“Our colonial history is going to inform a lot of what happens in the play,” she said. “And it feels contemporary, but I guess at the time it was written, these were a lot of the issues women were facing or suffering through that seem to be the same things that women are still suffering” today.

The Filipino-language production also demands particular attention to diction and delivery. Salonga said Luarca has been closely monitoring her pronunciation as they work through the script, correcting individual consonants and helping her understand the nuances of the translation.

She welcomes the scrutiny, recognizing that the character’s speech must reflect not only her authority but also her perception of her place in society.

Salonga is no stranger to the demands of musical theater. She won a Tony Award for her performance in “Miss Saigon,” became the first Asian actress to play Eponine on Broadway in “Les Misérables” and later returned to the musical as Fantine. Her other stage credits include “Once on This Island,” “Allegiance,” “Flower Drum Song,” “Here Lies Love” and “Old Friends.”

She most recently appeared with TGA as the Witch in its sold-out production of “Into the Woods.”

For an actress so closely associated with musical theater, a straight play performed entirely in Filipino might seem like an unexpected turn. Salonga, however, does not regard it as a threat to her established image.

“You gotta do something that scares you once in a while,” she said.

At this stage of her career, she added, she is less concerned about how audiences might perceive her decision to take on an unfamiliar kind of role.

“I think I’m at that point where that doesn’t matter as much,” she said. “I’d like to think that theatergoers are savvy enough to be able to separate the actor and what they’re doing onstage from the real-life person who gets to go home and cuddle their kid.”

The actress also wants to manage expectations about the production. Despite her musical theater credentials, “Ang Tahanan ni Bernarda Alba” is not a musical.

“The closest, I think, we’ll come to might be those evening vespers or whatever, or church chanting,” she said. “But, not singing. This is not a musical, it’s a play.”

Salonga, who turns 56 in February, also brushed aside suggestions that she might be too young to play the character, whose eldest daughter is 39. Bernarda would have been in her early 20s when she had her first child, with the remaining daughters born over the years.

She suggested that audiences who have watched her grow up onstage may be reluctant to acknowledge the passage of time.

“Maybe to a lot of people who grew up with me, it’s like they don’t want to admit that they’re aging as well,” she said.

The role could signal a new chapter in Salonga’s career, one in which she explores characters who wield power in less than admirable ways. Having played the Witch in “Into the Woods,” she is now taking on another formidable woman, albeit one whose cruelty is rooted in domestic authority and social expectations.

She is also interested in playing Rose in “Gypsy,” a role she took on in the concert production “Old Friends,” and in tackling some of Stephen Sondheim’s older female characters, like Joanne in “Company” and Sally in “Follies.”

For now, however, Bernardo Alba has her attention.

“Maybe I’m going to create this new chapter of my career playing villains and tyrants,” Salonga said. “Which is kind of fun. So I think I’m gonna just keep doing this for a while.”

The production is also a departure from another project audiences had speculated she might join: the musical “Sunday in the Park with George.” 

Salonga confirmed that she will not be appearing in it, saying the time has passed for her to play Dot, the musical’s female lead. “Ang Tahanan ni Bernarda Alba” will be her sole production with TGA this season, she said, leaving future projects open for discussion.

In the meantime, the fear she initially felt about taking on the role has not necessarily disappeared. But for Salonga, that may be part of the appeal.

“I’m excited and scared,” she said in the production’s earlier announcement, borrowing a line from “Into the Woods.”

For an artist whose career has taken her from Manila to Broadway and beyond, the next step is not another song or a familiar musical theater role. It is a woman who rules her household with an iron fist — and a language that will challenge Salonga to find a different kind of voice.