Acting in another language is great, and I've done that. But you can't do it as well as you can do it in your own language.
I might sing a gospel song in Arabic or do something in Hebrew. I want to mix it up and do it differently than one might imagine.
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
I'm obsessed with 'Wicked', and I'd love to play Nala in 'The Lion King'. Some of the songs from 'The Lion King' are performed in my native tongue, so when the cast performed an extract from the show in 'Strictly' in the language I grew up with, it made me cry.
Any fifth language that you use should be equally used as just another bit of theater language, so that if you have a strong text, then the light should be as strongly part of that text as, for example, the sound it should be or whatever it is that you see.
In 'A Royal Affair' I had to learn to act like a queen and learned Danish. It's so much different to act in another language. It's the nuances in the words.
Singing in a different language is a challenge, but 'Will I See You' was so much fun to create.
Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I'd sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.
If I speak Spanish in my show, which sometimes I do, I translate what I say. I make it where I can still be myself, but I make it to where everybody knows what the hell is going on and when everyone leaves, they're like "OK, I get it."
In another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it - even though it was all in Yiddish.
When I went to Japan I sang in Japanese; when I went to Greece I sang in Greek. When I went to Spain, I sang in Spanish. I couldn't speak it very well, but I sang, I was beautiful in singing it. These things just constantly attracted people to the uniqueness of who I was and the way in which I performed.
When you sing in English and Spanish, it's two completely different forms of expression and... even the people who don't speak Spanish love to hear me sing in Spanish.
