The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Mark Kennedy / The Associated Press
New York—Tony Award winner and The Voice of the Philippines coach Lea Salonga will join the cast of Star Trek actor George Takei’s musical Allegiance on Broadway, its producers announced last Thursday (last Friday in Manila).
The Broadway veteran played the lead female role, Kei Kimura, when the musical premiered at The Old Globe in San Diego, California, in 2012. She will reprise it at the Longacre Theatre starting this fall.
The producers also announced that Telly Leung of Glee will also rejoin the cast. The Rent and Godspell star had also been part of the original cast in California.
Allegiance is a multigenerational tale with two love stories that is framed by a Japanese-American war veteran looking back on his family’s time in a Wyoming internment camp during World War II.
Salonga starred in the original Miss Saigon in London and New York, and in the Broadway revival of Flower Drum Song in 2002, the last time an Asian-led cast of a musical hit the Great White Way.
Allegiance features music and lyrics by Jay Kuo and a book by Marc Acito, Kuo and Lorenzo Thione. It is being directed by Stafford Arima, who directed Carrie and Altar Boyz off-Broadway and whose own father was interned in Canada during the war.
Previews begin on October 6, with an opening set for November 8.
Takei was 5 years old when soldiers marched onto his front porch with bayonets in May 1942 and ordered his entire family to leave their Los Angeles home. It would be nearly four years until the family was able to return to Los Angeles, penniless and forced to start over on Skid Row.