From Glee to Godspell, and Pacific Overtures, Telly Leung has become one of the most beloved musical theatre actors of his generation, having lent his pristine voice to a varied array of characters in the years since his stage debut. But he might be delivering his finest work yet in The World of Extreme Happiness, a brutal drama by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig set in modern China, in which Leung plays two characters, one of them being Pete, the young sibling of the show’s martyred protagonist, Sunny (a splendid Jennifer Lim). Leung allows Pete to grow old in front of our eyes, as we see him turn from a playful boy, to a young man who must carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Under Eric Ting’s direction, we see a darker side of Leung he’d hinted at in shows like RENT, as he imbues Pete with heartbreak and unimaginable strength; unsurprisingly even without recurring to song, he remains as magnetic a stage presence as ever. We had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Leung about working on The World of Extreme Happiness, his love of everything related to Into the Woods and Madonna.
Pete delivers the show’s final monologue, a harrowing combination of pity, hope and disillusionment. How do you gear up for that ending every night?
I get asked that quite a bit, is this a hard play to do? My answer is always no, is it hard to watch? I actually think the rollercoaster is meant for the audience. It’s strange, we deal with very heavy and dark issues in this play, but we deal with them in such a fast pace that I think represents how fast China is growing, so dramaturgically the scenes work great. It also doesn’t feel crazy for us, because of both the pacing of the play, and also because a lot of us are double cast, we run offstage and change different clothes to play someone else.
You’re the son of Chinese immigrants. Was telling this story of immigration within China part of what attracted you to this part?
It’s interesting, this play is such a specific story about a phenomenon that’s happening in China, where so many of the rural peasants are migrating to the city to work in factories. I think American audiences relate to it because we are dealing with the same with our immigrant population. My parents immigrated here from Hong Kong, and as a second generation person I saw the struggles my parents had to go through. Getting their passport, green card, I have vivid memories of helping my parents prepare for their citizenship test because my English is better than theirs, I helped them memorize how many stripes were on the flag and that kind of thing. In the play Sunny makes a great speech at the end where she says that if all the peasants in all of China stopped working, where would China be? I think the same way about our immigrant population, if they just stopped working, our whole infrastructure would crash. So even if the play is specifically about China, it’s also about class and work issues all over the world. I think it’s quite universal.
Pete is obsessed with the monkey-man...
Oh, the Monkey King! That’s something very Chinese, the only way I can relate it to Western audiences is how American kids want to be Superman or Spider-Man, well, in China every little kid grows up listening to stories about the Monkey King. He’s this mutant creature, part monkey, part god, part human...as a Chinese American I grew up with both, my grandfather would tell me stories about the Monkey King and I’d want to be him, but then I’d go to school in Brooklyn and all the boys would want to be Batman or Superman, so I’d also want to be those. For the peasants in the play, the Monkey King represents invincibility and hope, defying the odds, the same way a superhero gives a boy hope.
By the end of the play, Pete also becomes very politically aware.
Yes, my director Eric is very much into comic books, and every superhero has an origin story, like Batman became Batman because his parents were killed. So even if the play is like the ballad of Sunny, at the end of the play you also get the origin story of Pete. If the play were to continue you’d know what kind of person Pete would become, because of how he lost his innocence. He goes from being a boy with all these dreams and aspirations and he ends up going to the city and becoming a janitor and not getting any closer to his dream.
He can also be a surrogate for the audience, will people leave the show more aware or as ignorant as when they first came in.
Right, will they leave the theatre with a new awareness of what is going on in China.
Do you remember your own entry into adulthood?
I’m an only child from immigrant parents, when they first got here they had like $200 and crashed in their friends’ couches. My dad got a job in a restaurant business and my mom got a job in a garment factory, they worked very hard and fast forward, my dad owned his own restaurant, and my mom still works, but now she only works twice a year for Fashion Week. She works for The Row, the Olsen sisters lines, she went from not knowing how to sew, to becoming one of the most respected seamstresses in Fashion Week. They worked so hard for me to have all the things they didn’t have, so when it came time for me to say to my parents I wanted to be an actor, it was very hard for them to digest. They wanted me to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or an engineer...I felt that figuring out whether I was going to be who my parents wanted me to be, or my own person, was a big step for me.
In America whenever a show features a cast with predominantly non-white members, people will assume the show is made for a minority. The World of Extreme Happiness features an all-Asian cast, but is undeniably universal, were you worried that people would think it was just for Asian audiences?
The show is very universal, I think what the playwright and director have done is very interesting. You’re right, when you see a specific ethnicity onstage, you think that story is very specific to them. It’s a reaction that happens when the audience thinks that because someone doesn’t look like them, they won’t be able to identify with them. Since this whole show takes place in China we don’t do it with any accents. I had a young Asian theatre student who went to one of our shows and she approached us and said she found it curious that we didn’t use accents, so I said “we’re all in China, why would we need an accent?” She said she was just used to seeing pieces with Asian characters with accents. I think theatre is supposed to open your mind and show you things can be done differently. Young Asian actors haven’t seen anything like this, it’s such an homogenous society, so it makes people feel like the story could be set anywhere.
The show’s themes about Westernization of Eastern culture reminded me of Pacific Overtures. Was that on your mind at all?
I feel that with the expansion of Asian countries, just like Japan opened up to the West, even America went through its own kind of Industrial Revolution, it’s just that China is going through this in a time when he world is spinning faster because of technology. America too went through harsh labor inequality, we had child labor even, but then came unions and things that made things more fair. You could argue that we have a long way to go, we don’t pay women the same we pay men - which was a very big deal at the Oscars - there’s still inequity but we’ve come a long way. China, because of the internet, is going through this much faster and all of us can see it happening. Our director puts it beautifully, he says this play is about a China that is growing so fast that it is tearing at the skin, it can’t keep up with itself.
Since you mentioned the Oscars, this year's host Neil Patrick Harris directed you in RENT at The Hollywood Bowl. Would he do magic tricks all the time during rehearsals?
One of my favorite places to go in Los Angeles is The Magic Castle and Neil’s also a very accomplished magician, besides being all the other wonderful things he is, so yeah, magic is his other life.
Into the Woods was the show that first got you obsessed with Broadway. Were you rooting for the movie to win awards?
Of course, Into the Woods was very big for me, because my parents weren’t aware of Broadway, they wouldn’t have been able to afford to take me either, I didn’t have stage parents, no Mama Rose in my family. My first exposure to Broadway was PBS, Great Performances, where they showed the telecast of Into the Woods, with the original company. So that was the first musical I ever saw, on TV, in channel 13.
I like that kind of story because theatre fans sometimes neglect movies and TV adaptations, and forget that’s how people outside NYC discover theatre.
I had no idea! I grew up in Brooklyn, that’s a train ride away from every show, and I didn’t know that was happening! Neither did my parents. I was worried about going to school and my parents were worried about making enough money to feed their child, but I turned on Channel 13 and that whole world was brought to life for me.
What part would you like to play if you ever got to do Into the Woods?
Oh gosh, I would love to anybody in that show...female, old, young. I just love that show and what it has to say. I love the music, nobody writes like Sondheim, so I’d give my right arm to be anyone in any of his shows.
You did a gender-bending version of Company in school.
We did, it was our senior production, Billy Porter directed it and I played Bobby. We had a strange imbalance of men and women for the show, so one of our guys Zach Halley, said what if we made Martha a man? and it just happened that one of the people Bobby dates is a guy called Marty. Billy loved it, because Billy loves that kind of thing. Fast forward many years and Zach works in television production, and we worked on a musical called Grind together. Even from back in college we knew he was more of a director than he was a performer, even though he’s a brilliant performer.
Are you involved in the rumored revival featuring all gay male characters?
They’re doing another Company? That’s awesome! I’d love to see that.
You need to be in that!
Oh gosh, it’s such a great idea, because again the music is so great. When we did the gender bending of company, many people had a theory when the show first came out that Bobby was gay, and that’s why he wasn’t married. But what if he was dating men and women and he was bisexual? The show then doesn’t become about his sexuality, but about finding a partner, whatever that partner is. Regardless of where he is in the Kinsey scale, the show at the end of the day, “Being Alive” is having somebody to share your life with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman, it’s about Bobby finding someone to share his moments with.
You made an album of covers which is pretty good, I’ve always liked the fact that you included Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach”...
That’s so funny. I grew up in the 80s, so the people that I listened to and loved were people like Michael Jackson and George Michael and Whitney Houston and of course Madonna. When you’re a kid singing along to the radio you have no idea that the song is about abortion, you’re eight! You don’t care, you sing it anyway, so I’d belt this song through the house but I had no idea what it was about. I do that song in my club act sometimes and I knew every word to every Madonna song, even though a lot of them were very inappropriate for a kid.
I love how “Papa Don’t Preach” goes with your version of “Children Will Listen” as well.
Thank you, now you know the story about me and Into the Woods. You know, my parents wanted me to do well in school, so when I came home from school I wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons, they’d only allow me to watch PBS because it’s educational. Well, lo and behold, PBS is what’s responsible for me not being a doctor and a lawyer, and being an actor instead. It kinda backfired on them, so “Children Will Listen” is kind of a “ha ha” to my parents. I listened, I watched PBS…
You’ve said that the one advice you can give actors is to keep studying, so what kind of courses are you taking?
I still take acting classes, I still take voice lessons, I take dance and yoga. I also think that it’s not just about going to class, it’s more about approaching everything you do with the mentality of a student, approaching every project - whether it’s a good show or a bad show - like a sponge. Sometimes you don’t work on wonderful plays or with great directors, I feel very lucky with this play which has been a dream, but you don’t always get this experience, but you can still learn something. If you walk into a rehearsal thinking you know it all, you’re not gonna grow, you’re not going to be the kind of energy that other creative people want to work with. Even doing the same show eight times a week, you learn something new about your character, every night I learn new things about Pete, maybe something happened to me that day which enriched the experience. Life is my classroom, theatre is my classroom. I know much more now than I did when I graduated college, but I still have so much more to learn. If you look at all the great actors, the Meryl Streep's of the world, they don’t pretend to know it all, every show they dive into they work just as hard. I had a lot of friends who were studying Shakespeare at The Public when Meryl Streep was doing Mother Courage, and they said that people would sit in the hall to memorize their parts, and in the floor was Meryl Streep memorizing her lines! She was one of them. That’s the kind of actor I want to be.
The World of Extreme Happiness is now playing. For tickets and more click here.
