Lea Michele Reveals What Duet She Sang Both Parts of to Land Her Broadway Debut at Age 8

Lea Michele is having a full-circle moment each night at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre. 

The actress, who is starring as Florence Vassy in the revival of Chess opposite Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher, remembered what it was like to take the stage nightly at the Imperial when she was making her Broadway debut in Les Misérables as a child. 

During an exclusive interview with BroadwayWorld’s Richard Ridge at famed theater district restaurant Sardi’s, the 39-year-old actress said that “everything” feels the same at the Imperial, where the original Broadway production of Les Miz played through 2003 after spending a few years at the Broadway Theatre (where it opened in 1987). 

“The smell is the same,” Michele said. “I walk out onstage to sing ‘Someone Else’s Story’ [in Chess] at the end of the show, and I’m just all alone by myself on the stage. I think it’s the only time that I’m all alone on the stage, and it’s the last song that I sing, and I look right at the center mark, and I think, ‘That’s where I stood to sing ‘Castle on a Cloud’ when I was 8.” 

“It’s an unbelievable, unbelievable full-circle moment,” she said. 

Michele — who alternated the roles of Young Cosette and Young Eponine and understudied the role of Gavroche — auditioned on a whim. 

The actress recalled how she went to an open-call audition after her friend’s father had a medical emergency that prevented him from taking his daughter as planned. 

“I sang ‘Angel of Music’ [from The Phantom of the Opera], both parts!” Michele explained to BroadwayWorld. “It’s a two-person song, and I made it one, and they were like, ‘Who is this girl, and what is she doing?’ I went with a friend, Chloe — she had taken me to see a bunch of Broadway shows before, and there was an open call in our hometown, and I wasn’t even supposed to go.”

“But we ended up having to take her cause her father got sick the night before, and then I ended up auditioning, so it was all of these things where it was like: this wouldn’t have happened if that hadn’t happened,” Michele explained. “But then it all came together, and I was on Broadway two weeks later.” 

At the time, Michele said, her father owned a deli in the Bronx. When Michele’s mother learned that she booked the role, “I remember her calling my dad on a payphone and being like, ‘She got the part!’” 

“We went to my dad’s deli, and my mother had to leave because we had a family member who was sick, and I just remember being there like all alone at my father’s deli in the Bronx, behind the counter with him, [thinking], ‘What is about to happen? What’s about to happen right now? I think something big just happened,’” Michele remembered. 

Two weeks later, she said, “I was on Broadway, and I just turned to my parents, and I just was like, ‘I want to do this for the rest of my life.’” 

Following her Broadway debut in Les Miz, Michele went on to play the Little Girl in Ragtime, sharing the stage with Audra McDonald, among many other Broadway greats. 

She landed her breakthrough role in Spring Awakening, playing Wendla opposite Jonathan Groff, before she booked a starring role on the television series Glee. 

She returned to Broadway in the revival of Funny Girl before taking on the part of Florence in Chess. 

“This is the first time I get to enter a story as a grown woman,” Michele said. “She has an incredibly tragic past and a deep history to her, but that is all something that she holds deep within herself.”