Nathania Ong, the West End’s Éponine, wants the roles nobody has written yet

Nathania Ong

Born	1999 Singapore
Occupation	Stage Actor
Awards	Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia

At the KC Arts Centre in Singapore, Nathania Ong walked onstage in a hoodie and opened her solo show with “Don’t Rain on My Parade”. There was no wig and no barricade, and no character to stand behind. For a singer whose reputation was built inside other women’s roles, Éponine in Les Misérables and Eliza in Hamilton, that was the whole idea. She had told Tatler Singapore that the characters she most wants to play next are “the ones that haven’t been written yet”. Her year at home has been a long test of that sentence, and of whether the audience that fell for her Éponine will follow her somewhere else.

In the Ong home, singing came before ambition. She is the youngest of four sisters, and their father, Kevin Ong, a dentist who once sang semi-professionally, was her first vocal teacher; by her account he still has notes on every performance. She remembers a car ride with the whole family belting five different songs at once, which she describes as chaos that somehow worked.

The stage found her early. At five she sang the National Day ballad “Home” with one of her sisters at a Total Defence Day concert, and at twelve she led the choir in the national anthem before 27,000 people at the closing ceremony of the 2010 Youth Olympic Games. School was less of a stage. Ong, born in 1998, went through Methodist Girls’ School, spent eight years as a competitive cheerleader and joined the drama elective programme at Anglo-Chinese Junior College. “I wasn’t very smart and my studies weren’t very good,” she told SilverKris. “And that love for performing never really went away.” After her A Levels she applied to drama schools in Britain and was turned down by every one of them. She spent a year studying acting at LASALLE College of the Arts, applied again, and in 2018 won a place on the musical theatre course at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London. To pay for the move she worked three part-time jobs, in retail and as a tutor.

Once she was in London, the breaks came fast. While still a Mountview student in 2021 she made her West End debut as Jenna Rolan, the school gossip of Be More Chill at the Shaftesbury Theatre. During its five-week run she auditioned for Éponine in the UK and Ireland tour of Les Misérables, a show she had never seen. She got the part and became the first Singaporean to play it, and in 2022 she was moved into the London production at the Sondheim Theatre. In 2023 she sang “On My Own” at the BBC’s Big Night of Musicals in Manchester, in front of 12,000 people, a night she still calls her proudest.

Between London contracts she kept a foot at home. In 2023 she played Cinderella in Pangdemonium’s Into the Woods at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre, and that December she staged a charity homecoming concert at the Esplanade to raise money for young artists from disadvantaged backgrounds. In June 2024 she took over as Eliza at the Victoria Palace Theatre, the first Singaporean in that role as well, and stayed until March 2025. Then Éponine came back, this time on the road with Les Misérables The Arena Spectacular, the 40th-anniversary concert staging that took her as far as Japan and Shanghai.

The label that made her has also boxed her in. “First Singaporean” headlines turned two supporting parts into national news; The Straits Times itself called Éponine and Eliza “coveted supporting parts”. Both are women who watch the man at the centre of the story choose something else, and for years Ong was cast, and covered, as the voice of that loss. She has pushed against the soft version of it. “I didn’t want her to be pretty,” she said of Éponine, arguing that “On My Own” is less about unrequited love than about a girl realising “the only piece of kindness in her life no longer belongs to her”. In June she went further and said she would not play Éponine again. The turn has a cost. Reviewing her solo concert, Honest, the critic at Bakchormeeboy found that the stripped-down keyboard arrangements could not carry the weight of Hamilton‘s “Burn”, and that by the end of the night the fatigue showed. The same review saved its warmest words for the title song, an original she wrote after a 2024 break-up, given a spare blues and acoustic arrangement.

The first real proof of the new direction came in the summer. Her Éponine homecoming had already filled 56 performances at Sands Theatre between March and May, opposite Lea Salonga as Madame Thénardier, a singer Ong calls “the benchmark, especially among Asian performers”. Then Singapore Repertory Theatre gave her top billing for the first time, as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde at the Esplanade Theatre from 29 July, directed by Kate Golledge with an all-Singaporean company, K-pop styling and Nathan Hartono as Warner. Bakchormeeboy praised her because “she never treats Elle as unintelligent”; BroadwayWorld wrote that her “flawless ‘So Much Better’ alone is worth the price of admission”. In May, Forbes had put her on its 30 Under 30 Asia list for entertainment and sports.

She has been open about where she wants to go after that. She grew up on R&B and pop, “yet they are not what I am known for”, and talks of writing more of her own songs, possibly a musical theatre album, and of trying voice work, television and screen acting. London remains her base. She has described the back-and-forth with Singapore as feeling “a bit like a double agent”, with chosen family in one city and real family in the other.

The rest of the year tests the idea from two directions. On 30 November she takes the title role in AYLA, a new musical by composer Gianluca Cucchiara and producer Giovanna Romagnoli, given a single semi-staged concert at The Other Palace in London after a concept album on which she sings. On 17 and 18 December she fronts the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the Esplanade Concert Hall, with around 80 musicians behind her for the first time. That concert is called On My Own. The London night matters more: AYLA is the first part she will carry that no one sang before her.

Tags: actors, actresses, Hamilton, Legally Blonde, musical theatre, Les Misérables, Nathania Ong