Lea Michele Walks Through Her Broadway Résumé—From Les Misérables to Her Full-Circle Return in Chess

Lea Michele is currently starring in Chess on Broadway as Florence Vassy at the Imperial Theatre, the same house where she made her Broadway debut as Young Cosette and Eponine in Les Misérables 30 years earlier. In between, she got married, became a mother to two children and performed in four Broadway musicals—no big deal. Michele and Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek walked through her résumé, visiting each theater and reminiscing over everything from sleepovers with Jonathan Groff and the cast of Spring Awakening to making Rachel Berry's dreams come true starring as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.

After Les Miz, Michele played The Little Girl in the original Broadway cast of Ragtime, in what was then called the Ford Center for the Performing Arts. It's now the Lyric Theatre, where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child continues to cast a spell on audiences. Michele, too, found magic onstage, gliding in pirouettes and becoming enchanted by Tateh's silhouettes. At 11 years old, Michele moved to Canada for a year along with the original cast ahead of the show's Broadway premiere. There, it was 12 months of "building this show, creating it, getting to hear some of the most iconic, memorable, greatest songs in Broadway history for the first time; hearing songs get cut and new songs get added in. Hearing Audra [McDonald] sing 'Your Daddy's Son' for the first time, and Marin [Mazzie] singing 'Back to Before.'"

In 2004, Michele came back to Broadway to play Shprintze, Tevye's fourth daughter in Fiddler on the Roof. She was 17, a high school student. "I wasn't going to take any time out of school to work, but when Fiddler came, it just felt so right," Michele recalls. "When the opportunity came along, I felt like it was something I couldn't really miss. And it was such a beautiful production. So many members of my Sephardic family came and it's just a story that is so near and dear to our Jewish faith."

Michele applied to colleges and was accepted to NYU while in Fiddler, but she was also doing readings of Spring Awakening. "It was this big dilemma, like, 'Do I go to college? Do I continue working?' And I inevitably ended up going and doing Spring Awakening." She famously turned down the role of Eponine in the 2006 revival of Les Miz to originate the role of Wendla in Spring Awakening, but it remains a dream role. "I always want to play Eponine. For the rest of my life, I want to be Eponine," she says.

The Eugene O'Neill Theatre, currently host to the doorbell-ringing Elders in The Book of Mormon, is where the iconic duo of Michele and Groff began what would become a lifelong friendship. "I slept in this theater two times," Michele says of the Spring Awakening house. "We snuck in overnight and we slept in this theater." Of her experience starring in the "cool" musical, Michele continues, "We knew magic was happening, that's for sure." But it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. "We were dealing with some really intense subject matter, so we were able to live in those moments of feeling like rock stars—but I think a lot of it was also battling with the subject matter of what we were doing every night," she explains. "How we released that was by spending time with each other, because it was intense. But at the same time, so fun and special. This changed everything for me."

In fact, it was seeing Michele in Spring Awakening that led Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy to write the character of Rachel Berry for her. The lore established on the show, in which Berry's dream is to star in a Broadway revival of Funny Girl, became a reality for Michele in 2022 at the August Wilson Theatre. "I really think that Funny Girl was meant to come back into my life once I was a mother and a wife, because that is so much of what her story is," Michele reflects. "We think about Fanny on the stage and performing and being so driven, which is true. And it is true for who I am as a person as well. But what Fanny wanted just as much was love and to be a wife and to have a real life outside of what she does professionally. I think the universe was waiting for me to have that experience so that then I could truly come and play this part with that life experience behind me."

Now that she's a mother to two young children, Michele's latest return to Broadway in Chess wasn't a decision she made lightly. "I thought after Funny Girl it would be really challenging for me to find something that I felt as equally inspired by," she admits. "Then Chess came along, and I'm having the greatest time of my life. It is a gift, as a performer, to be on the stage, have no fear and feel like you can just soar. I haven't felt it in a very long time, and I feel it again."

Taking it back to the beginning, that feeling all started for Michele in 1995, young and fearless, singing "Castle on a Cloud" center stage at the Imperial. "It opened up my heart and my mind to the thing that has brought me so much joy in my life, which is this community and Broadway and performing. I still remember every single thing about Les Miz from when I was eight years old."

The full-circle nature of coming home to Broadway in Chess is not lost on Michele. Every time she walks center stage at the end of the show, she thinks about standing in that same spot as a kid. "Members of my family that are no longer with us were able to come into this theater when I was eight years old and see me perform, and I think about them all the time now when I'm performing. I have a one-year-old and a five-year-old, and the other day my mom brought them to the theater. She was like, 'I can't believe I'm bringing my grandchildren into the place that I brought you when you were eight.'"

Michele will play her final performance in Chess on June 21. "This has been one of, if not the greatest creative experiences I've ever had," she says of the role. As for what's next for the Broadway veteran? "All I want to do is another show and another show and another show. I feel so grateful to have been a part of this amazing community for so many years. This is where I want to be. I just want to keep working and performing here on Broadway." We should be so lucky!

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