‘The ingénue is dead for me’: Disney’s original Jasmine Lea Salonga, who comes to Hong Kong in January, on what musicals should be like today

Born in Manila, Salonga began performing at seven, encouraged by her cousin to audition for The King and I (1978) with Repertory Philippines. Trained by theatre founders Baby Barredo and Zenaida Amador, she went on to appear in Fiddler on the Roof (1978), Annie (1980) and The Sound of Music (1980). At just ten, she released her first album, Small Voice.

Her breakthrough came in 1989, when she auditioned for the role of Kim in Miss Saigon on London’s West End, becoming one of the youngest recipients of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical. When the show moved to Broadway in 1991, she became the first Asian performer to win a Tony Award, helping open doors for Asians on the global stage.

It was her portrayal of Kim that caught the attention of Disney casting director Albert Tavares, who was searching for a singing voice for Jasmine in the animation Aladdin. “Jasmine wasn’t even supposed to sing originally. It was an 11th-hour decision,” she recalls. “The actor [Linda Larkin] had already recorded all her dialogue, but she couldn’t sing—so, lucky me.” Six years later, Salonga became the singing voice for the titular role in Mulan.

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“I didn’t expect that to happen,” she says. “But as someone who grew up listening to Cinderella storybook tapes when I was five, it was really special to give voice to another heroine.”

Now, her focus has turned to offering the same magic to a new generation of listeners. “As I get older, the way I sing changes a little bit, but I try not to alter the sound,” she says. “Those songs hold strong memories for people. My job is to bring them back to when they were five, watching Aladdin, and hearing Robin Williams and A Whole New World for the first time. You’re placing them back in that distant, emotional place.”

That connection, she says, is what keeps musical theatre alive in an age of automation. “There will always be an attraction to watching live human beings doing the extraordinary things two feet away,” she says. “With screens, people wonder if there’s AI or auto-tuning involved. But when it’s live, you understand that the actors onstage are just another human being like you, and I know the hard work of actors and singers that goes into a performance. When your heartbeats are syncing up, and you are having this experience in the same room with the performers, it’s wonderful; it’s magic; it’s spectacular.”

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Beyond fairy-tale nostalgia and experience, Salonga values musicals for their capacity to confront real issues. Playing Kim in Miss Saigon taught her the complexity of storytelling and representation in musical theatre. The show has faced criticism for its portrayal of women and its reinforcement of Western stereotypes of Asian women as ultra-sexualised. “You can’t see the wine label when you’re in the bottle,” she says. “When I was in the show, my job was just ‘here, let me do this show’. I’m not saying that any of the protesters was wrong, but now that I’m older and can dissect it a little bit more, I think one should also look at how the show was staged.”

She credits director Nicholas Hytner for giving the production a subversive edge. He often positioned the women downstage and the men facing the audience, forcing viewers to confront them “as if looking into a mirror,” she explains. “We saw the men drunk, abusive and high. We see them in the position of the demons. He was putting the American GIs in the position of the bad guys. He was saying, ‘These are not your heroes, ladies and gentlemen.’ We also have to remember this was 1975, at the tail end of the Vietnam War.”

As Miss Saigon continues its UK tour (launched this month in Birmingham), its message still resonates. “[Gender equality] is still something women are fighting for,” she says. “How you stage something, what you make the audience see and what you embed in the back of an audience’s mind is important,” she continues. “So as controversial as the show is, there are a few things that enter my mind and go, ‘Well, that’s interesting how this was done.’”

Since the first Miss Saigon, Salonga is pleased to see a growing diversity on Broadway and the West End, and she’s proud to be a part of this. “I’d like to think that the representation of people of colour on stages like Broadway and the West End has got better. We see more people of colour than when I first did Miss Saigon. Even just the talent pool has expanded,” she says.

For the next steps, instead of just casting performers of every descent, she urges for more stories of people who have come from those parts of the world. “Hamilton may boast of a large representation, but the story is still very white American from the times of the founding fathers. It’s not a story about, say, a Latino man and his story of immigration. This is a story about someone who is white and immigrated, found footing for himself and ended up becoming one of the founding fathers of the US. Even though it is an immigrant story, it’s still a white story,” she says. “I’m looking for people-of-colour stories, because this country is incredibly diverse, and the storytelling needs to reflect that.”

Would her own story qualify? She smiles modestly. “The only thing I want to leave behind is that I did good work and that I made a lot of other people who looked like me want to do it,” she says. “It’s one of those things that when you see someone who looks like you onstage, it inspires you to try. It gives me hope—but I’d love to see more.”

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