Lea Salonga Will Star in the Titular Role in Ang Tahanan ni Bernarda Alba

The Tony Award-winning actress will inhabit the tyrannical matriarch in Theatre Group Asia’s Philippine staging of the Spanish play.

It’s been a whirlwind season for one Lea Salonga, who in the past year alone completed tour dates across North America and Asia; starred as the lead villain in DreamWorks Animation’s inaugural Filipino-first film Forgotten Island; and got herself a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And she has no intention of slowing down, as she said herself in her speech on Hollywood Boulevard. “The best part is,” she said after recounting her journey to get to where she is, beaming at the crowd, “I’m not done yet.”

For her next act, the Tony Award-winning actor is set to star as Bernarda Alba in Ang Tahanan ni Bernarda Alba, Theatre Group Asia’s Philippine staging of the play by Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca about an oppressive mother who forces her five adult daughters into an eight-year period of isolation.

Adapted by director-playwright Chay Yew and translated into Filipino by Guelan Varela-Luarca, the show will still tackle its original themes of blind tradition and social repression but, through its new lens, will also closely “examine Filipino family dynamics and values,” Theatre Group Asia announced.

“Bernarda is a mother who rules the roost and raises her children not with love but fear,” Salonga said in the statement, offering her own perspective on the role. “This kind of parenting still exists, whether for cultural or familial reasons, and getting under the skin of such a mother may give me some empathy for her as well as plenty of sympathy for her children. Her rule is law for every person living under her roof, and that house is not a happy place. How does anyone reach that point? It’s definitely going to be, dare I say, fun playing detective and piecing all that out.”

Playing the tyrannical matriarch will be “fun” for someone like Salonga, who is no stranger to delivering heavy, all-consuming roles, but it’s equally terrifying, she says, describing her nerves as “a literal terror I feel in my soul.” Part of that comes from Bernarda’s parenting style being worlds different from her own; another part from the play being entirely in Filipino. “To borrow a line from Into the Woods, I’m ‘excited and scared.’ ”

But the type of work that sits just outside the veteran actor’s comfort zone has always been the work she actively seeks out. In 2024, ahead of taking center stage in the similarly heart-wrenching one-act play Request sa Radyo, she told Vogue Philippines, “It can’t always be the happy musicals. The function of theater is to show truth, to illuminate the human condition. Sometimes it means happy, sometimes it means not happy at all. Ready or not, here we are.”

A play like Ang Tahanan ni Bernarda Alba will be unflinching from those hard truths, she said of its staging. “This is an absolutely important work to tackle. It fits our culture and is timely given the state of current events in the world.” Opening in February of next year, the play will hold up a mirror to Filipino audiences, ready or not.

Ang Tahanan ni Bernarda Alba will run in February 2027. For more information, visit Theatre Group Asia’s website.