We caught up with Broadway darling Telly Leung a couple of hours before his evening performance of the new musical Allegiance, to talk about working on the show with the iconic George Takei and his "big sister" Lea Salonga, his new album Songs for You, and how acting is very similar to teaching.

I’ve never talked to anyone so close before doing their nightly performance. So what are your rituals before the show?

Actually, both Lea Salonga and I have the same ritual, which is we get to the theater about an hour and a half before showtime, and we start a warm up. This is a tough show for both of us, so we need to be pretty disciplined, and also we have to properly prepare for the show.

I don’t think your voice has ever sounded better than in Allegiance. It’s a show where you’re singing all the time pretty much too.

Thank you so much! Me and Lea are pretty busy in this show, not just on Broadway, we’ve been doing this show together for six years, from development, to readings, to taking it to San Diego, and now to get to do it on Broadway with her is an incredible experience.

You, Lea and George Takei represent three generations of Asian trailblazers, was this something on your mind at all?

Well, I don’t quite think of myself as a trailblazer. But before I even worked with George on the show, he’s always been such an icon, not just for people who love Star Trek and Hollywood, but especially to the Asian community. He was the actor that was doing it when there was almost no, or very little, Asian representation in the media. George has always been this iconic figure for all of us, so I’ve always looked up to him and what he’s done. Lea Salonga won her Tony Award when I was 11 years old, and seeing her in Miss Saigon, and seeing her win a Tony on television, made some part of my subconscious go “oh my god, I can do this, there’s a place for me in this business”. Watching Lea win a Tony was one of those experiences that changed my life. Do I hope, we also can have that effect on the next 8 or 9-year old Telly Leung sitting in the audience of Allegiance? Yes! I hope some Asian kid in the audience goes to our show, sees George and Lea and knows he can be up there someday too.

I’m pretty confident this is the most diverse season Broadway has ever seen. Do you think that, fingers crossed, this is an omen of things to come, or just one very exceptional year?

I think that it’s many things happening, it’s the fact that we have so many brave producers making risky works. Musicals like Hamilton, On Your Feet and Allegiance, nobody thinks those are going to be surefire successes. There’s an element of risk involved in saying here’s 13 million dollars to produce a musical about the Japanese internment camps. I applaud the creators and producers that work hard to bring a show like ours to Broadway. It also boils down to the fact that audiences are smart and want to hear these stories. Audiences want to know more about the American experience, and America is a country based on immigrants, diversity and people who’ve come here from other places to seek a better life. It’s true of George’s family, my family, Gloria Estefan’s family, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s family...that is America in a lot of ways.

Last time we spoke, you were in The World of Extreme Happiness, now you’re in Allegiance. Have you found that as you grow older your calling as an artist is to be involved in shows that go beyond being entertainment, but also have an important social message?

My feeling as an artist is that the best theatre does both. I also do a lot of teaching on the side, because I feel I’d be nowhere without the teachers who’ve given me so much, so I also feel it’s time for me to give something back. As I teach young theatre students, I find that it’s not very different to being an actor onstage, it’s the same thing. Teachers gather a classroom of kids together, you have to keep them entertained for the hour, and you also have to make sure these kids leave the classroom feeling different, that they see the world in a different way. That’s exactly the same thing we do as actors, we gather a group of a thousand people on Broadway, that becomes their classroom where we hope they’re being entertained and we hope that through the piece we’re doing they leave the show feeling different. It goes hand in hand, as I develop as an actor I find they are very similar.

When I first heard about Allegiance I didn’t know how anyone could make a musical about such a shameful, tragic episode in American history. I was even more surprised to realize the show had an element of hope at the end, it shows something terrible, but it invites us as an audience to help prevent repeating the same mistakes. So I loved that out of all the songs from the show, you included “Second Chances” in your album, because this is what the show is about basically.

I really feel there is no way for us to grow as human beings, and also as Americans without embracing the good, bad and ugly of who we are, and learning from our mistakes, being kind to each other but also to ourselves. We need to allow ourselves to make mistakes, but also to learn and move on. That is what makes America so unique, to achieve a perfect union is impossible, but to strive for a perfect union is noble. We can try to reach those ideals as best as we can. Allegiance is a show that takes place in the 40s, but so much of what the show talks about is so relevant to today’s headlines.

In the album notes you mention who each of the songs is dedicated to, which saves fans a lot of time in trying to decipher secret messages…

I really do, I feel very grateful for all the people that have been in my life personally and professionally who have brought me to where I am today. Oftentimes when I do acts in clubs I dedicate songs to people and when I give them a song, or a moment, or a performance, the song takes on a different life, a whole different meaning. This is especially true when it’s a song everybody knows, like “Leaving on a Jet Plane” is a song we all know, but on the album I dedicate that song to my partner because I’m constantly on the road, and leave him back home. It happens all the time, so to make that song about him gave me an opportunity to explore that song in a much more personal way, which is what I wanted to do with all of these songs. everybody loves “New York State of Mind” and Billy Joel’s version, but the song means a lot to me because I’m a born and raised New Yorker, “Being Alive” is dedicated to Billy Porter because he was my teacher, and when he came to Carnegie Mellon to teach me, we were doing Company, so I can’t sing that song and not think of Billy. In many ways he’s also responsible for my first Broadway show, which was Flower Drum Song. The dance captain on that show was Marc Oka, who was also in the original Miss Saigon in 1991, Marc was one of the people who hired Billy that year after he graduated Carnegie Mellon. So Billy told Marc about me and got me an audition when I was just a college student. That song is always and forever dedicated to Billy.

Since you mention that song in particular, I’m curious about the different levels of performance, for instance how do you separate from Bobby and Telly when you’re doing “Being Alive”?

What I love about what I do in concert and clubs is that it’s not Telly as Angel or Sammy from Allegiance, it’s Telly as Telly. It’s a rare opportunity for me to tell my story and to express my art from my perspective and that’s really what I wanted to accomplish with the album, to give my listeners a little piece of me. I think the best actors do that as well, I try to do that in Allegiance, even if it’s a Japanese-American in the 1940s I try to find a way so Telly Leung, a Chinese American person in the 21st century can connect with him on a very human level. Some of the best acting comes when you’re able to find those layers of connection and I wanted to find that in my album, everyone knows “Human Nature” as sung by Michael Jackson, but not everyone knows what it means to Telly Leung.

That’s what every artist should aspire to…

I think so, I think that’s why we go to the theatre and listen to music. Adele and I have albums coming out on the same day and I’m such a big Adele fan, I can not wait for her album. Is she technically the best singer in the world? I don’t know, but she sings from a place that is so deeply rooted in her truth that when you listen to her sing is undeniable that she has lived every word that she is singing.

One last thing, on a scale of 1 to 10, how hard was it to make a selection of songs for this album?

Gosh, as you can see from my albums I have such an eclectic taste in music and there is so many music from so many genres that I really, really love, that it was very difficult picking music for this album, I really would love to sing all the songs in the world. It was like an 11 difficult (laughs). These songs are the top of the top though, they’re only 12 songs though, and there are more than 12 special people in my life, but these perfectly capture where I am right now.

Telly Leung's Songs for You is now available in stores and on iTunes. For tickets to Allegiance click here.