August 12, 2024 | 10:30am
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines’ first Olivier and Tony Awards Best Actress winner, Lea Salonga, shared an encounter with “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe that helped her in her ongoing West End and Broadway projects.
In a talk recently in Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Circuit Makati for their upcoming play “Request sa Radyo,” Salonga and Dolly de Leon, the Philippines’ first British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) and Golden Globe nominee, were asked by Tony Award-winning costume designer Clint Ramos about the most challenging roles they have ever portrayed.
“When you like basically, like God, this is hard work, you know, I think ‘Sweeney Todd’ might have been but incredibly rewarding and very freeing also,” Lea said, referring to her 2019 theater portrayal of Mrs. Lovett opposite Jett Pangan in the titular role of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” which the actors performed in Manila and Singapore.
“And then probably ‘Old Friends’ is also hard because you think you’re doing it right, and then the producer comes up to you and says, ‘No, no, no darling, you’re halfway that,’ so like s—,” Lea recalled her Broadway and West End performances in “Old Friends,” a musical revue of Stephen Sondheim’s songs, in which she stars with fellow Tony winner Bernadette Peters of “Annie” fame.
In “Sweeney Todd,” said Lea, the “challenges are multilevel.”
“There is the dialect and I get pretty OC (obsessive-compulsive) about making sure that everything is right, the Hackney accent, to make sure that one, it’s correct, two, it’s also intelligible and because some of those lyrics happen so quickly, I gave myself anxiety pretty much every night that I had to perform that song… because not even, not even the repetition will help,” she shared.
What helped her overcome her ordeal, said Lea, was some pat on the back from “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe.
“It made me feel better though, talking to Daniel Radcliffe who was Harry Potter,” she said.
She recalled that Radcliffe shared to her how he handled a very difficult song in his recent portrayal of Charley in the Sondheim musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”
“So he had just finished doing a run of ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ and as Charley, he has this song, ‘Franklin Shepard, Inc.,’ which is probably twice as terrifying as the worst pies in London,” Lea said.
“So I felt a little better because he said that he has to go through that song every night before he does it on stage. But even that is not a guarantee that it’s gonna go well. And so it helps for me anyway, just to go through the lyrics like as a speed exercise just to make sure that it’s there, that my muscle memory has it. And then when I do it, it’s just, I don’t have to worry about it,” she added.
Apart from Daniel’s advice, Lea said she also got help from a dialect coach “to make sure that everything was done properly.”
Although she and Daniel are already Tony winners, it still takes a village for them to be successful with their every role.
“Yeah, you have to have a support system to enable you to do well to ensure,” said the Tony Best Actress winner for “Miss Saigon.”
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