Meet Joreen Bautista, the Filipino Theater Actress Cast as the Newest Miss Saigon
You might have fallen in love with Joreen Bautista over the last couple of years for her silken voice and twinkling eyes as the “Filipino Disney Princess” of social media. But when she’s on stage, playing Kim in Miss Saigon, Bautista exudes a darker, more poignant kind of brilliance. Kim might be the heroine, but she is no princess—and Miss Saigon, by all counts, is the farthest away from a fairytale that a story could ever get.
Roughly three years have passed since Bautista performed as alternate Kim in Miss Saigon shows worldwide. Many a time, she still wonders if she dreamt the whole thing up.
“Until now, I keep pinching myself,” Bautista tells Esquire. “Like, really? That happened to me?”
After a well-spent hiatus, 22-year-old Bautista is more than ready to return to the stage—this time, singing in Danish. Come 2023, Bautista will grace the theaters of Denmark as cover Kim in Miss Saigon Copenhagen, older, wiser, and more confident than ever before.
Joreen, the Torchbearer—and So Much More
A question, first and foremost: will any other musical rival the power of Miss Saigon to ignite Filipinos’ hearts with pride?
Once Lea Salonga was cast for the original West End production, Miss Saigon went down in history as the musical that put the Philippines on the world map of theater. Salonga’s Tony Award-winning performance laid the groundwork for many Filipino theater artists who would play Kim in years to come.
Joreen Bautista was only in high school when she became the next bearer of the torch—but anyone who’s had the privilege of seeing Bautista in action will tell you that calling her the “next” anything just doesn’t quite cut it. After Salonga herself watched Bautista perform, she affirmed that Bautista was no replica of any Kim who had come before her.
“She perfectly embodied that role, but did not in any way look or sound like a carbon copy of any previous production,” Salonga said to Lytham Festival about Bautista. “It was all hers, but everything was right.”
But here’s the incredible bit: playing Kim was never the plan. And, somehow, Bautista landed the role with exactly zero formal training, and zero professional experience.
Joreen Bautista with Cameron Mackintosh, the original producer of Miss Saigon
How 16-Year-Old Bautista Became the Next Kim
“On both sides of the family, we’d always been generations of people loving singing, performing, playing instruments,” Bautista shares. While her professional theater background didn’t exist before Miss Saigon, performing was always a huge part of her life. Neither of Bautista’s parents are strangers to the stage; her father did plenty of hosting gigs, and her mother did front-acts for several local concerts.
What truly solidified Bautista’s relationship with the arts, however, was her education. Bautista attended Brightwoods School in Pampanga growing up, where performing and talent-building was their students’ second nature.
“Every year, we would have shows and musicals,” she says. “It’s a school that really values the arts, so I kind of grew up with the stage as my playground.”
Younger Bautista would immediately jump at the chance to see touring musicals when they came to Manila. She watched everything, from fairytales like Beauty and the Beast, to more mature plotlines like Les Misérables; but it was while watching a local musical production that she realized her dreams of becoming a professional theater actress, too.
“I was like eight or nine years old. The real moment I realized that I wanted to be in musical theater was when I watched The Sound of Music, which was a local production, and saw the Von Trap children on stage,” Bautista recounts. “So, as a kid, it was watching all these shows and watching children my age doing shows on stage that made me say, Oh. This is something that I also want to do.”
A childhood photo of Joreen Bautista with her mother, Maureen
Years later, Bautista was in the middle of preparing for her high school exams back in 2016 when she saw a poster for the Miss Saigon open auditions in Manila. Thrilled, then-16-year-old Bautista asked her parents if she could audition—but not for the reasons you might think.
“I wasn’t thinking Kim. Actually, I didn’t even imagine that at first. If anything, I thought I’d probably play a vendor in the show,” she says.
“[My family and I] were looking at it from their perspective: I’m a high school girl studying ABM, with no professional theater background. Why would I land the iconic role of Kim, right? So back then, I just wanted to be able to tell my kids that, once upon a time, I got to experience what Lea Salonga went through to get to where she is. I went in that same audition room, sang for the same panel, and the composer of Miss Saigon himself heard me sing. That would have been good enough for me.”
Obviously, we all know how that turned out. To this day, she doesn’t seem to fully comprehend how it all happened; at the auditions, she found herself in a room full of celebrities, artists, and professional theater actors. Over a thousand applicants came to the Manila auditions alone, and Bautista was the youngest one there.
“People would always ask me, What do you think they saw in you?” Bautista recalls, years after the day that changed her life. “Because, definitely, I wasn’t the most talented person in the room. I know that because I saw them.”
“Everyone was so confident. Everyone knew what they were doing. I had no idea what technique to use, or what to do and not to do at an audition. But I guess, now, it makes sense; they weren’t looking for someone who knew what she was doing. They were looking for someone they could mold.”
Looking back at her first years in the show, Bautista says she was so innocent that she barely had to act in Act One—the part of the story where Kim is abruptly thrown into her new life as a bar girl and prostitute. After her family is killed in the Vietnamese war, she’s left with no choice but to work at Dreamland, a brothel frequented by American marines.
“When I’d see what my co-actors would have to do in a scene, my reactions were just as raw as how Kim’s would’ve been,” Bautista tells us.
When she’s on stage, playing Kim in Miss Saigon, Joreen Bautista exudes a darker, more poignant kind of brilliance; Kim might be the heroine, but she is no princess. And Miss Saigon, by all counts, is the farthest away from a fairytale that a story could ever get.
“The story of Miss Saigon takes place in Dreamland, where all the girls know what they’re doing. They know what they want, and they know how to get their American G.I. And in the middle of that world, Kim’s just there. Just innocently being herself. I think that sort of mirrored me in that audition room, if that makes sense; they saw how raw I was as a person, and I guess they saw that I listened to them. I think that’s how they saw the Kim in me.”
One with the Local Legends
By way of association, anyone who stars in a musical as legendary as Miss Saigon becomes a legend in and of themselves, too. Miss Saigon has been an auspicious career catapult for many Filipino theater artists; and, as we all know, we Filipinos are exceptional at taking pride in those of our artists who make it to the global stage.
One might suspect there to be some huge, crushing weight on the shoulders of Bautista, whose predecessors have been named living legends. But there are quite a few other things she deems more important than worrying about every Filipino who came before her.
“Honestly, when you’re there, you barely think about it,” she says. “You’re just thinking about doing your job, making sure you tell the story right, and making sure you don’t mess up. That’s my top priority, beyond thinking about the legacy and all that.”
“I’m here because I’m telling a story,” says Bautista. “That felt even more magical to me than all the ‘legacy’ and ‘passing the baton,’ and all the ‘I’m the next blah, blah, blah, blah.’”
The whole concept of “Filipino pride” is always an interesting thing to pore over. Heartwarming as it may be for whoever is on the receiving end of our heated love declarations, the roots of Filipino pride can easily be traced back to a long, tragic history of Filipino shame.
It’s no secret that centuries of being called a second class race still color the Filipino mindset today, revealing itself in the way we only pay a second glance to our artists if they’ve been recognized by some foreign entity, or in the way that our artists with mixed nationalities get more support than full-blooded Filipinos. In the aftermath, it makes for a vicious cycle of an underpaid, underappreciated, and undersupported local arts industry.
“The notion is that if you’re an artist in the Philippines, you’ll go hungry,” Bautista laments.
“But when international productions come all the way to the Philippines just to find their Miss Saigon cast, why can’t Filipinos see that potential in their own artists?”
Joreen Bautista (Alternate ‘Kim’ in Miss Saigon U.K. & International Tours, 2017-2019) and Rachel Ann Go (‘Gigi’ in the Miss Saigon 2014 West End revival and 2017 Broadway revival)
Filipinos have long been recognized for their excellence in the performing arts, but there is still plenty of work to be done in order to gain wider public interest, and truly establish the Philippines as a place where artists can thrive.
“I don’t know where exactly it starts, or where it’s supposed to start,” Bautista says, “but what I am a hundred percent sure of is that the Philippines is a factory of talents. And we could rise so much further in our arts industry if we’d only give them a chance—when that time comes, I know. I know we can make it as big as the U.K. productions, or the New York Broadway productions.”
One Dream After the Other
Bautista has a number of big dreams for our local arts scene, among many others that she’s been pursuing in the last few years. During her break from theater, which she began after the Miss Saigon International Tour in 2019, she’s still been bringing joy to Filipinos and herself in different ways.
To no one’s surprise, her Disney princess singing videos won’t stop blowing up on social media. This relatively newfound hobby of hers is a win for everyone; Bautista gets to live out her childhood dreams of being a Filipino Disney princess, and Filipinos get to indulge themselves in her magical voice. Occasionally, Bautista also covers songs from classic Broadway musicals, or the latest Filipino pop hit.
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Bautista also began her studies at Ateneo de Manila University during the break, which she says has been her dream school since the very start. But, after almost four years apart, Bautista and the stage are destined for a reunion.
“I’m so excited about the idea of Copenhagen,” she says. “Now that I know I’m going back, there are so many ideas I have for what I can do on stage, from an artistic point of view.”
“You know how you don’t really think when something big happens to you? It all just sort of happens,” Bautista says. “In the three years of my break, there have been so many moments when I’d think about the show, my take on the role, and how I told the story. Equally, I’ve also been thinking back on all the opportunities I didn’t grab when I was living in the U.K. on my own.”
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“I could have learned to cook this, and I could have visited that, I’d think to myself [during the break]. Back then I was so scared to take public transport, so I barely explored the massiveness of Europe. So, what I’m most looking forward to in Miss Saigon Copenhagen is doing all things that I realized I wish I did back then—now that I’m older and wiser and more confident than ever before,” Bautista jokes.
Regardless of how many recipes she fails to try, or how many lines on the Danish metro she doesn’t take, Bautista will no doubt bring pride to Filipinos once again as she plays the legendary role of Kim for the second time in her life. As Miss Saigon fans in Denmark bear witness to her craft, those of us back home will honor her with a deafening round of applause. The authenticity of our patriotic spirit then will remain open to question; but maybe somewhere between our outcries of joy, and the warm feeling of pride bubbling up in our chests, we’ll see that our culture is so much more than our colonized history—and that the Filipinos’ story has always been brilliant, both on its own and in relation to others.
