Interview: Lea Salonga on STAGE, SCREEN & EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN at Town Hall

Starting next month, legendary actress and singer Lea Salonga – best known for roles including voicing Disney's Jasmine and Mulan – will begin the North American tour of her new Stage, Screen and Everything in Between show. In the show, musical theatre fans will experience stage and screen classics from her iconic roles including songs from Miss Saigon, Les Misérables, Aladdin and Mulan, new-found favorites from the critically acclaimed Broadway and West End hit Old Friends, in which she recently starred on Broadway across from Bernadette Peters, Broadway blockbusters, pop classics, and much more from her celebrated career and beyond. The show will come to NYC's Town Hall on October 20th, and tickets are already moving quickly.

I spoke to Salonga in June, right before she started rehearsals for a sold-out run of Into the Woods in Manila which she is currently starring in. Read our conversation below.

(This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

How does it feel to be taking the Stage, Screen and Everything in Between tour to North America?

It's actually quite exciting. It means, basically, that my year has been very busy, coming from Old Friends, and then by the time the tour starts, I will have just finished our run in Into the Woods. So, we hit the ground running in 2025 and it's going to be fun to switch gears from doing a Broadway show into doing something different. It'll be nice to get back together with my band and backup singers and just be able to go around [the US and Canada] again.

It'll be a lot of fun.

What do you enjoy most about performing as yourself?

The nice thing is that I can switch off the... I have to keep an arc throughout a show that lasts two, two and a half, three hours.

This is more of just singing the songs and just having fun and not worrying too much about anything except the song as its own thing. And it's nice to be able to look at an audience and be able to interact with them and to not have a fourth wall come up at all. I mean, in Old Friends we do have moments where it's like that, but for the most part, I treat it as a musical and even when I do have moments of looking at the audience, I do try to really focus on creating an arc within the song, as if I was doing an actual book musical. For a concert, I don't have to think about that. And then I just go from one song to the next song to the next song and have it really be a very direct type of interaction with the audience. If someone from out of the abyss laughs or does something I can really hone in on whoever that is and have a little fun.

Can you talk a little bit about the experience of crafting the setlist for this show? You have such an insanely long career – how did you decide what the highlights were and how to fit that into a flow?

Oh, these things require meetings. I think there was a Zoom meeting with Josh and Gerard [Salonga], who music directed the show in the UK and in Manila. We were all sticking to the theme of “stage and screen and everything in between,” and we came across a point where, okay, we need a film song, we need something that's upbeat, we need something that's familiar, we need whatever. And for one song, we decided to get ChatGPT to help us and ChatGPT came up with a list. And there was something on the list where we all went, “ooh, we’ve got to do that.” I mean, ultimately, we have to do the work, and there's only so much that this kind of help can do, but it was helpful because I think we were running out of ideas at that point for an upbeat “film, familiar, will get folks feeling good and engaged.” So we did enlist quite a bit of help. And it was it was just so fun to get together. And we all were throwing ideas out. If there was something that we felt, “ooh, let's do that,” we would all give it a try. We didn’t cut very much. There were a few things that we would be like, okay, I can't sing this right now because of I’ve got fatigue. And then when we were in Manila, we decided, “let's permanently keep that out because we don't really have any need for it,” and the flow after editing just felt so much better. But yeah, putting something like this [together] takes a village.

What do you want people to take away from the evening of watching this show?

I don't know that there's a greater take away for anybody. I just want folks to come and sit back and have a good time. That’s really it. Nobody has to necessarily be thinking about anything deep. I just want folks to come, sit in the dark for a couple of hours with me, and we'll just have a wonderful, wonderful time.

Is there anything else that you want to add about the tour or anything else that we haven't touched on yet?
I'm looking forward to visiting a lot of places that we visited before, and a lot of places [where] I have friends and family because it'll give me the opportunity to get to see people that I haven't seen in a while, whether it was due to the pandemic or circumstance. And looking forward to places that I've never been to.

All in all, I'm just looking forward to singing this material again. There's a lot of Sondheim, as there usually is now in my concerts. There’s pop music. There’s stuff that is so familiar to me. I normally travel with a teleprompter, but there are some parts of the show where I never have to look at it just because the songs have etched themselves in my bones ever since childhood. I'm really, really, really looking forward to it.

What's your favorite part about connecting with a live audience in this type of intimate concert?

It feels more like a conversation. It doesn't feel like I'm in a piece that feels like I'm in an aquarium, and then an audience is just kind of there. I mean, they're participating, but more as a commentor on what's happening rather than an active participant. In a concert, the audience for me feels like a much more active part of the proceedings just because I can really respond directly. If they're laughing at a joke that I deliver, then I can follow up, which I'm not always able to do in a book show just because the script is structured in a very particular way.

Tickets and dates for Salonga’s upcoming concert tour are available on her website at www.leasalonga.com/tour. The New York date is October 20, 2025 at Town Hall.