It was snowing in Toronto on the day Ma-Anne Dionisio called her parents to tell them the news. At 18, she’d been the first person in the country to audition for Kim in the Canadian debut of Miss Saigon, and she’d made it through every stage of the seven-month-long casting process. In documentary footage from January 1993, her fingers are curled around the shiny black handset of a corded phone; her hair’s tucked behind one ear. “I didn’t get the part,” she says into the mouthpiece. “I’m not even going to be in Miss Saigon.” And then a mischievous smile spreads over her face. “Guess what? Guess!”
“Got it,” says the voice on the other end.
“Got it,” Dionisio confirms, and launches into delighted laughter. She had, in fact, booked the role. She was going to be the original Canadian Miss Saigon.
Playing that character would launch a three-decade acting career, one that’d whirl Dionisio around the globe and deposit her on some of the world’s biggest stages. But at the time, Dionisio didn’t even consider it a dream come true. For someone stepping into one of the country’s most prominent musical theatre roles, she’d had strikingly little experience with theatre. She’d only ever seen Les Mis, and from the cheap seats at that. Her dreams were different: to be a doctor, a pilot, maybe an astronaut. “I’m a walking example of what life looks like while you plan it,” she tells me from Calgary, over video call. She’s squeezed our conversation into a busy day of rehearsals, two weeks into work on Theatre Calgary’s world premiere production of The Tale of the Gifted Prince, a musical by bookwriter-lyricist Lezlie Wade and composer Daniel Green. Later, I realize that we’re speaking on the 36th anniversary of her arrival in Canada.
Dionisio was born and raised in Metro Manila, and even as a small child, she was particularly sensitive to the emotions of the adults around her. She thought she’d been born to be a healing angel. But when she was 14, she signed up for a singing contest on a dare from her classmates, and stumbled across a life-changing talent. Soon after, she managed to snag a spot in her church’s choir, even though she was two years younger than their age cutoff.
Around that time, Philippine network giant ABS-CBN was running a national talent search, and Dionisio agreed to tag along to her best friend’s audition for moral support. As it turned out, someone from her church worked at the studio. He spotted her, and told the creative team she could sing. The network decided to develop her as a recording artist. “It didn’t come naturally to me, the whole performance thing,” she tells me. “In my mind, because I was heavily raised Catholic, I was doing God’s will.” That didn’t stop executives from hatching big plans. They paired her with the country’s leading actors for TV feature films; she sang at a show with Sharon Cuneta, one of the Philippines’ biggest stars. And then, on New Year’s Eve 1989, Dionisio’s mother broke the big news: in a few weeks, their family was moving to Canada.
Dionisio was 16 when she landed in Winnipeg. There, she joined another church choir and landed a leading role in Experience Canada, a touring musical celebrating Canada’s 125th anniversary. That role put her on the radar of the Miss Saigon casting team. But she still wasn’t all-in on performing. She was a science student at the University of Manitoba, weighing two potential paths — dentistry or medicine — when she sent in her audition tapes for Kim.
The 1990s was the golden era of mega-musicals, and Miss Saigon was as big in scale as Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis combined. Mirvish built a $22-million theatre, the Princess of Wales, to house the show. Construction was still ongoing when Dionisio joined the cast, and she remembers being given a hard hat so she could explore the theatre site. She’d moved to Toronto to do the show. In her memory, it felt like being a little kid asked to move to New York. She was still fairly new to Canada, and living in the country’s biggest city was surreal.
She worked on Mirvish’s Miss Saigon for two years, and tells me that the most important thing she learned from that experience was to put storytelling first. In one nightmarish but pivotal scene, the American love interest of her character, Kim, escapes wartime Vietnam in a helicopter as she remains trapped outside an embassy. In keeping with the Broadway and West End iterations of the show, production designer John Napier built a helicopter with a real motor for the scene. Director Nicholas Hytner told her that if the audience applauded afterward, the helicopter had upstaged her. Instead, she should aim to be so devastating that they couldn’t breathe.
The coming years brought project after project, all over the globe — the Stratford Festival, Broadway, a world tour of Les Mis with an iconic stop in Shanghai (she played Eponine; it was the first time an English-language musical went to China). In the late 1990s, after she’d played Kim in Australia, Cameron Mackintosh invited Dionisio to star in the original West End production of Miss Saigon, which had been running since 1989. During rehearsals, the cast sat through historical videos of the Vietnam war. By then, Dionisio had seen that footage so many times. She had to excuse herself. “It actually felt like I was there,” she says. “Those images got stuck in my head. What I’ve learned is that your body doesn’t know the difference. Your brain thinks it’s happening to you.”
Stafford Arima, Theatre Calgary’s artistic director, was fresh out of university when he landed a gig as a production assistant on the 1993 Mirvish Miss Saigon. While we’re speaking on the phone, he tells me that a picture of him and Dionisio dropped out of a photo binder the other day. Later, he emails it over. It’s from Miss Saigon rehearsals, backstage at the Princess of Wales. The pair are smiling at the camera. Both of his arms are slung around her. He’d eventually go on to direct her in a 2011 Sacramento iteration of Miss Saigon, and Theatre Calgary’s 2018 production of Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon’s Secret Garden musical.
What Arima recalls from Sacramento is Dionisio’s exemplary openness. He explains that some performers get stuck in the motions of the original production. “It would have been very easy for her to say, ‘Well, I’ve played the role before and this is how it’s done,’” he says. “She approached the experience as if it was new, and that, to me, says a lot about her as an artist.”
Over the years, between the productions where their careers have intersected, he’s watched plenty of her shows. Thanks to her capacity for vulnerability, she’s a powerful conduit for a character’s emotional current, he says. “‘Truth’ is always what I think about when I experience her on a stage in performance,” he says. “It’s raw. It’s immediate.”
Nina Lee Aquino, the artistic director of the National Arts Centre English Theatre in Ottawa, remembers seeing a teenage Dionisio’s face on Filipino TV, back before they both relocated to Canada. Dionisio has always been a star for Filipinos, she says. “She’s like the Justin Bieber of Winnipeg.”
In early 2020, Aquino directed Dionisio in Factory Theatre’s world premiere production of Marjorie Chan’s Lady Sunrise — a rare non-musical role for Dionisio. It surprises Aquino that Dionisio’s not cast more often in that kind of setting. “She’s just as intense, rigorous, and playful as an actor,” Aquino tells me. “If the script were music sheets, she was constantly trying to fine-tune the score of the storytelling. She approached it the way she would approach any beautiful piece of music. She attacked it with nuance; she dug deep with every line. And she was game to do anything.”
Still, Aquino says, in the rehearsal hall Dionisio carries herself with humour and ease. “I think she’s able to do that because she does the prep work beforehand… I feel like, secretly, she goes home and she freaking studies the bejeezus out of her scripts. I had a sneaky suspicion that she was off-book in the early days of rehearsing. She really wanted the chance to play all the notes of the music, so to speak, before we really locked down on all the best choices for her character.”
There is, indeed, an intense dedication to the way Dionisio speaks about her job. She compares being a musical theatre actor to being an athlete: it demands your whole body, at a high intensity, especially when some contracts are 10 shows a week. “You have to know how to take care of your body and your mental health,” she says. “It’s a very disciplined craft.”
Over time, mental health has become increasingly central to her work. When Dionisio played Diana in Musical Stage Company’s 2019 production of Next to Normal in Toronto, she says she was undergoing trauma in her personal life, and almost bowed out of the show. “That made it even more important for me to focus on the boundaries of where Ma-Anne begins and where Ma-Anne ends,” she remembers. By then, she’d learned a lot from her many years playing heavy roles. She told the company, “‘We have to enter the space acknowledging, out loud, that this is not happening to me.’
“I call it a check-in and check-out,” she tells me. “That way, at the end of the day, you leave everything there.”
For that role, she ended up earning a Dora Award for best leading performance in a musical. “Dionisio performs with so much intensity and emotion that you often feel as if you’re inside Diana’s restless skin,” wrote Martin Morrow in the Globe and Mail.
Then, while in technical rehearsals for a 2022 play called Lesson in Forgetting, she suffered a stroke. She didn’t tell anybody at first — just withdrew from the production. This might be the first time she’s spoken publicly about that experience, she tells me. She underwent brain surgery, which she remembers taking longer than the doctors expected — maybe 14 to 16 hours. Going in, she didn’t know if she would walk or talk again. She didn’t even know if she would live. Afterward, she was wheelchair-bound.
For a moment, she wondered if she was meant to stop being an actor — if she should, perhaps, go back to school and try to become a doctor. Frustrated by her experiences in the medical system, she sought out other means of healing. She tells me that a shaman helped her walk again. And then a new part fell into her lap.
The Tale of the Gifted Prince is based on Lloyd Alexander’s novel The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen. Dionisio’s character, Woman, dons the guises of various sages to guide the titular character along in his journey. (In the novel, the character is a shape-shifting male character, but Lezlie Wade, the playwright, made a change for the musical. “Female voices in the book were sorely missing,” she explained via email.) Woman is also a shaman. “What are the chances?” Dionisio muses. When she was offered the job, she realized she didn’t have to choose between helping others and performing. Instead, this was the full expression of what she came into the world for. To sing, to act, to heal.
I ask her to tell me more about the role, and admit I don’t have a lot of info about it. “Well, you and me both,” she says, and laughs. “Two days ago, we got 100 new pages.” What she does know is that she’ll be shifting into several different people, and she’s excited to pick the character apart and put it back together.
The show’s grander in scale than she anticipated. On day one, she saw the costumes and set design for the first time and was reminded of being handed a hard hat at the Princess of Wales. There’s excitement in the air, she says. “I haven’t seen a show like this being built since Miss Saigon.”
Most of the characters she’s played either die or kill someone. “I’m just done with all the gory stuff and the killing,” she declares. “I want substance. I want depth. I want joy.” And maybe a show like this, one that’s less heavy, is what audiences want too. “Theatre gets its nudge from the collective. It’s like, ‘What do we need right now?’”
To her, connecting with the audience is the point of theatre — she’s moved by the way energy cycles through a room, and how it can be a spiritual thing when done right. “Art has a very significant healing aspect to it,” she says. “The performance aspect, for me, always comes secondary.”
All these years later, a performing career still doesn’t feel like something she’s chased. “I’m very grateful that I was somehow invited into the world of theatre,” she tells me, “and that I’m somehow still here.”
The Tale of the Gifted Prince runs at Theatre Calgary until March 15. More information is available here.
Theatre Calgary is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Jadine Ngan
Jadine Ngan (@jadinengan) is a National Magazine Award-nominated journalist based in Toronto. You can find her bylines in the Walrus, Maclean’s, Toronto Life, and Chatelaine.
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WRITTEN BY
Tim Nguyen
Tim Nguyen is a lifelong member of Calgary’s performing arts community and among its most sought after documentarians. His immersive images create an intersection between cinematography and photojournalism, striving to capture productions with accuracy and integrity. In his spare time he enjoys hiking, tabletop gaming, and is an embarrassingly mushy cat dad.
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