Between worlds: from Éponine to Elle Woods, Nathania Ong is finding her own voice

That truth has been forged under pressure—something Ong admits she once resisted acknowledging. “It took me a long time,” she allows. “When you take on a role like Éponine that has a very strong legacy, there are a lot of comparisons.” Even during the Singapore leg, the weight of that legacy remains immediate. “I was so nervous [because] I’m performing with Lea Salonga, knowing that she would hear me [sing],” she says of the musical theatre royalty who has inhabited both Éponine and Fantine on Broadway as well as in landmark anniversary productions. “She has always been the benchmark, especially among Asian performers. I admire her a lot.”

The candour is telling. It reveals how even a performer on one of musical theatre’s most visible stages must contend with comparison, inheritance and the pressure of stepping into a role shaped by legacy. Ong does not attempt to outgrow that anxiety. Instead, she absorbs it into the work. Criticism, she says, is inevitable because “all of our work is subjective”. Her response is not to smooth her interpretation into something more universally palatable, but to hold her ground in it. “I’m trying to be the most honest and authentic version of my characters that I take on every single day.”

Ong’s reputation is for emotional precision and she understands exactly how constructed that precision is. “Every day that I step on the stage,” she says, “I tend to adapt the way that I sing On My Own, just very slightly—even if it’s not noticeable to other people.” The calibration depends on her own emotional weather. “Sometimes, I’m a little bit more resigned. Sometimes, it hurts a little bit more. Sometimes, I’m elated about the fact that even though he doesn’t love me, I got to fall in love.” It is a rare articulation of disciplined variation—of a performance that remains alive to the moment.

That attentiveness marks a deeper shift, one that began early in Ong’s journey and extends beyond geography. Rejected by every drama school she applied to straight out of junior college, Ong enrolled at Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts before transferring to Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London—a move she now describes as formative. “When the bird flies the coop, you really learn to be independent,” she says. “You’re open to an entire new world of creativity that you didn’t know existed.”

The arc across her roles has become clearer. Ong made her West End debut in 2021 as Jenna Rolan, one of the school gossips in Be More Chill, a pop-rock musical about teenage anxiety and status. She then played Cinderella in home-grown theatre company Pangdemonium’s 2023 staging of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s darkly layered musical, Into the Woods, which rethreads familiar fairy tales into an adult meditation on desire, consequence and care. Returning to the West End in 2024, she inhabited Eliza Hamilton in Hamilton, providing the quiet dignity that anchors the momentum of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s era-defining musical about the founding of the US. Come this July, she will take on Elle Woods in the Singapore Repertory Theatre’s Legally Blonde – The Musical—a staging built around an Asian cast and a contemporary pop visual language.

Each production differs in tone and “each of these respective characters has offered me a significant acting challenge”, says Ong. Even so, a line can be traced. Éponine sits close to what she calls her “resting energy”; Eliza is much further away; Elle, she says, connects to the part of her that spent eight years as a competitive cheerleader. Still, her articulation of the last is revealing. “She is incredibly intelligent,” Ong says. “She really is a testament to [the idea that] you can do anything you put your mind to.” She also recognises something of herself there: “I would like to believe that I’m quite resilient; I work really hard.”

For all the momentum in her career, family remains the quiet structure beneath it. Her lockscreen, Ong shares, is a photo of her family dog, Marshmallow. Her mother visits when she is on tour; her three sisters are a steadying presence. Her father—a dentist and a former semi-professional singer—was also one of her first vocal teachers, and she calls him once a week when she can. His advice to the younger, more uncertain Ong was simple: “You don’t have to be confident, you just have to act confident.” It is the kind of clarity that endures. He still keeps her grounded, she adds, not least because he always has notes on her performances.

This is why Singapore now reads less as a point of origin than as a vantage point, as Ong herself puts it when asked whether she is a Singaporean artiste on a global stage or a global artiste who happens to be Singaporean. She chooses the latter, but with a qualification that matters: she is a global artiste, she says, who “prides herself very strongly in being Singaporean”. London, for the foreseeable future, remains the base. Yet she also describes living between London and Singapore as feeling “a bit like a double agent”, with chosen family in one city and real family in the other.

All of that leads naturally to Honest, the solo concert Ong will stage in Singapore this September. Held over three days and built as an intimate live-band series of four performances with musical director Kelvin Loh, it draws on musical theatre repertoire, contemporary influences and original songs. More importantly, it appears to offer the clearest expression yet of what Ong is moving towards. “I’ve really made plans to kind of strip it back and to find me and my essence,” she says. “At the moment, I’m discovering who I am. As an actress, we take on roles, but I want to find out what Natty sounds like.” While her roles have made her visible, this concert asks what remains when the characters fall away. Audiences here will also have more opportunities to see Ong perform as she makes her Singapore Symphony Orchestra debut this December with two evenings of musical theatre, Broadway and Disney favourites.

In that sense, success now looks different from the language of firsts that once framed her. Ong is explicit that Éponine “was my beginning”. She wants to solidify her voice, keep growing and move towards work that can be more fully hers. The most revealing moment comes when she says that the characters she is most excited to play next are “the ones that haven’t been written yet”. It is a striking statement from a performer already associated with defining roles. What she is after is another milestone and the opportunity to create an interpretation that she might one day, as she puts it, be able to “call mine”.

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