Broadway performer Telly Leung has learned flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic the way a marquee star learns his lines.
He has made little time for grousing over lost concert dates nor a shuttered theatrical world.
Instead, he and his husband have transformed the living room of their intimate, 500-square-foot Manhattan apartment in Hell’s Kitchen into a recording studio for 40-year-old Leung’s recent EP “You Matter.” A bit of that ambitious project will be part of the former “Aladdin” lead’s socially distanced Cabaret at The Commons concert at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 10 in downtown Columbus.
“What’s the use of complaining or constantly looking back to the way things were pre-COVID?” asked Leung, speaking by phone from his New York City home.
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Clearly, the upbeat fellow who once spent many a night crooning to audiences about “A Whole New World” has embraced adjustments in this whole new world perhaps as well as any entertainer could.
“Am I used to it?” Leung asked. “No, never. But we’re making due.”
He even learned how to shoot and edit videos as part of what he labels his “quarantine project.”
Lueng’s local show will include his longtime musical director and keyboardist Gary Adler. The pair expects the set list to feature a Disney tune or two, songs from his Broadway shows, selections from two solo discs (including a lighthearted tune “Zoom With You” about Zoom-oriented romance), and a few other favorites.
“It should feel a lot like a personal conversation,” he said.
Lueng did his first live show in months recently in a theater parking lot near Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“As hungry as I have been to get back on stage, you actually can feel that audiences are just as hungry for live music,” he said
Leung, with seven Broadway shows — including “Rent,” Allegiance,” and Flower Drum Song” — to his credit since 2002, grew up with parents from China, who escaped communism by swimming seven hours to Hong Kong. They later learned English by watching American television. Their inspirational immigration story, with only $200 in their pockets, is part of his cabaret presentation.
“Audiences tend to gasp when I tell them this,” Leung said. “But my parents weren’t unique. Many people fled communism in similar harrowing ways…And, at the end of the day, we are a country of immigrants.
“What has happened to us the last six months has allowed us to hit the reset button. And I think all immigrants have that — that sense of reset — in their DNA to make a fresh start. Immigrants and their children like me understand what it is right now in these times to begin again.”
His mom and dad, now in their 70s and living in Brooklyn, picked his first name from “Kojak” lead actor Telly Savalas.
So who loves this Telly, baby?
Enough fans for him to have performed sold out shows at venues such as Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center. Unconventional Broadway actor and singer Billy Porter, who did a local cabaret show in 2016 and who taught Leung at Carnegie Mellon University, helped Leung land an audition for his first Broadway show “Flower Drum Song.”
“What I love about him is that Billy is just Billy,” Leung said of the over-the-top personality who remains his friend. “He leads with his authenticity.”
Besides Broadway, Leung starred as the character of Wes on Fox’s smash television series “Glee.” When the actor was 8, he watched a PBS broadcast of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” featuring the Broadway company with Bernadette Peters, “and I wore out that VHS,” he has said in several interviews. As he got older, his passion for theater grew so much that he saw “Rent” 14 times before he was ever in it.
He laughed about whether he gets recognized in a neighborhood where Al Pacino freely walks the streets without being bothered and Meryl Streep can be spotted on the Manhattan subway and left alone.
Besides, when he gets home after biking near Central Park, Leung’s spouse reminds him of life off the stage.
“You’re no longer a Broadway star,” he will tell Leung. “Please take out the trash.”
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What: The Columbus Indiana Philharmonic’s Cabaret at The Commons with Broadway performer Telly Leung. He has starred in shows such as “Godspell,” “Rent,” “Allegiance” and “Aladdin.” Plus, he also starred on TV’s “Glee.”
When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 10.
Where: At The Commons, 300 Washington St. in downtown Columbus. The venue layout will be socially distanced and will be limited to 250 seats. All attendees must wear a mask. Also, there is no post-show meet-and-greet.
Tickets: $45 and up, available at the cip.org.
Information: 812-376-2638.
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