Whole new worlds yet to conquer

Lea Salonga walks the streets of her hometown of Glendale in relative obscurity. “I usually roll around without any makeup on, in jeans and a sweatshirt,” she says. “Hardly anyone notices.” But when the Filipina singer, who as a teenager sprang to fame in the mega-musical “Miss Saigon,” strolls into Bahay Kubo restaurant, in the middle if L.A.’s Filipinotown, she’s like Britney Spears at an Iowa shopping mall.

Heads turn. The kitchen empties as the staff throngs to greet her. Eleven-year-olds with braces approach shyly to get an autograph. Filipino gang-bangers with shaved heads and too-baggy hip-hop jeans turn into giggling teeny-boppers and beg for a photo. “Lea, please,” they say, “you are just sooo pretty. I am a big fan.”

Everyone uses her first name. She is, simply, Lea.

They know everything about her career. “Miss Saigon,” Disney’s “Aladdin” and “Mulan.” They know her as a magnet for conflict over multiculturalism. They even know her star turn in the Mark Taper Forum/Broadway revival of “Flower Drum Song.” They know her because she’s a “hometown” girl made good.

She smiles for every photo, signs every napkin. “I feel a sense of responsibility,” she says, “When I perform, other Filipinos come up to me and say, ‘You make us hold our heads high. You make us very proud to be Filipino because of what you’ve done.’ ”

Now, as she embarks on her first solo U.S. concert tour, Salonga’s challenge is to somehow meld into one critical mass the support of her community, her fading Broadway celebrity and the love of every kid who ever imagined being Princess Jasmine singing “A Whole New World.”

The tour includes stops in San Francisco, Chicago, Atlantic City and here at the Universal Amphitheatre, all towns that include large Filipino communities. With her brother, Gerard, as musical director, she performs a mix of her Broadway and film hits, jazz standards and a smattering of Filipino pop songs.

“This is going to be cool,” she says, as she digs into some spicy fish soup that reminds her of home. “I have such a good time doing this show. I share a lot of my family stories, and I talk a lot. I go, I just ... go. The only thing the audience gets is me. It’s like a long conversation, with songs.”

The tour represents, perhaps, Salonga’s fourth attempt to achieve the stardom that has proved frustratingly elusive to Asians in America. Her fans might argue she’s already been there, done that. But as she sips her soup and spins out the story of her life here in L.A., it’s hard to see in this pretty, 34-year-old woman as anything but another struggling actress.

She takes acting classes, occasional voice lessons and goes out on TV auditions. She’s relentlessly positive. Yet as the story unspools, it is difficult to fit her pedestrian present into her impressive past.

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A household name

She began as a hometown child star, the “Shirley Temple of the Philippines” -- professional chorus of “The King and I” at 7, title role in “Annie” at 12. Her first gold record came at 10, when her mother, Legaya, hired an orchestra to record with her daughter, then released the result on her own label after record companies passed. More quickly followed.

A teenage Salonga hosted a daily TV variety show and, Mouseketeer-like, became a household name. Suddenly, there was Lea. But hers was a kind of “big fish in a small pond” fame.

Theatrical impresario Cameron Mackintosh introduced her to the world stage, and set her on the road to a Tony, when he cast her in the title role in the London premiere of “Miss Saigon,” the last of the great power-pop mega-musicals. She won the Olivier Award, for best actress in a musical, at 19.

Broadway beckoned, but Mackintosh’s attempt to bring her and co-star Jonathan Pryce to the States in 1991 raised the ire of Asian American artists and Actors’ Equity, the stage actors union. Playwright David Henry Hwang (with whom Salonga later worked in “Flower Drum Song”) and actor B.D. Wong led the charge, demanding that an Asian play Pryce’s role and an American play Salonga’s.

Mackintosh canceled the Broadway run, forcing Equity to relent on Pryce, then went to arbitration for Salonga, where her London reviews were used to make the case for her “unique service” to the show. “Most of the controversy went on over my head,” she says. “I grew up in Manila, which is a big cultural melting pot. I knew Equity was trying to protect their membership, but culturally, I didn’t understand what they were getting worked up about.”She took the opposition as a challenge -- and came away with the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards.

She recorded “A Whole New World” for Disney’s “Aladdin,” which won an Oscar for best original song. In 1991, People magazine put Salonga, still sheltered and yet to go on a real date, on its list of “most beautiful people.” “It was a great year,” she says now, with a sigh, “maybe a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”

The hint of chagrin in her voice as she recounts the glory days foreshadows what was soon to come. “I had just left ‘Miss Saigon,’ ” she recalls, “my agent called with an audition for some show. Then he called back about 10 minutes later and said, ‘They don’t want you to audition because you’re Asian.’ ”

She not only couldn’t get roles, she couldn’t even get auditions. Suddenly, Salonga realized what it was to be an Asian performer in the U.S., and why her first trip stateside caused such a fuss. “It felt very strange,” she says, “having a Tony on my bookshelf and being told I can’t audition. It was a wake-up call.”

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Acceptance elusive

When Mackintosh offered to let her take over the role of Eponine in the already long-running “Les Miserables,” she jumped at the chance to make herself believable as a French girl. “I wanted to prove that Asians could play these roles,” she says, “that nontraditional casting worked.”

She succeeded in the role, but still no parts came. She had hit what one might call “the yellow ceiling,” the almost unexplainable difficulty Asian entertainers face achieving acceptance in race-neutral roles in America.

“It’s not a mystery,” says actress-playwright Sumi Sevilla Haru, former acting president of the Screen Actors Guild and co-founder of its Ethnic Employment Opportunity Committee. “They just out-and-out don’t hire Asians. Perhaps because over the years, whenever they cast an Asian in a role, they would have to explain in the scene why that person was Asian. You might have to call it racism.”

There are notable examples of performers who have broken through -- Lucy Liu, fellow Tony winner and “Law & Order: SVU” star Wong and, more recently, Sandra Oh in “Sideways” -- all have achieved success in roles where their ethnicity was secondary to the character. But they seem exceptions. “What holds Lea back over here,” says Haru, “is not her talent. It’s that she happens to be a Filipina.”

There are those who disagree, feeling that Salonga’s acting skills might not match her vocal abilities. Reviewing “Flower Drum Song,” the New Yorker admired her “great prowess” as a singer, but found her less persuasive otherwise, with an emotional range that “veers between simper and whimper.”

The gap is something Salonga acknowledges and trains hard to improve. But conversations about her work keep circling back to issues of ethnicity. “I think she’s really good,” comments a major casting director. “Why doesn’t she work? The big problem is the lack of roles for ladies of color.”

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Work in Asia

If teenage Manila was phase one of Salonga’s career, and “Miss Saigon” phase two, the decade since has been a slog of a phase three. There has been some soap opera work, a guest shot on “ER” and various televised musical performances. Mostly she’s been Lea in Asia -- musical comedies in Singapore, concerts and pop albums at home in the Philippines. There, her hometown fame still translates into decent paydays, breathless press and steady, if unspectacular, work.

But Manila isn’t the Great White Way. “It makes you grow up and becoming pragmatic,” she says. “I take the work where I can get it.”

Wiser now, Salonga lives in a netherworld between adulation there and relative obscurity here. “It’s nice working in Asia,” she says with good humor, “because casting directors never say, ‘We’re not going to see her because she’s Asian.’ ”

Not surprisingly, she’s not satisfied. So she’s hit the road, with a five-piece band and a sheaf of sheet music under her arm. Her San Francisco show was nearly sold out to a majority Filipino audience. Pre-sales in other cities are strong, including her Los Angeles stop Saturday, and talk has begun of adding Orlando, Fla.; Seattle and Washington, D.C. There’s also talk of a Vegas gig, or perhaps a full-fledged concert career. “What excites me is the opportunity to perform,” she says, both determined and coolly realistic.

“I want to get out there and say: This is the face of an Asian entertainer in America. I would like to be known as someone who is able to transcend racial boundaries.

“But I also want to present myself as honestly as I can,” she adds, smiling for another fan’s cellphone photo. “Because if you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you are going.”

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Lea Salonga

Where: Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City

When: Saturday, 8:15 p.m.

Price: $51.50-$200 through Ticketmaster