A true star is born at ‘A Night at the Musicals’, with stunning show tunes from Miss Saigon, Les Misérables and more

Forget the formulaic, on-screen singing competitions that serve to make Hong Kong’s search for home-grown talent seem desperate and insular – on June 12, a true star was born and it happened at “A Night at the Musicals”.

There was no live-streaming, no saccharine emotional build-up – simply a sold-out crowd inside the theatre at City Hall in Central on Hong Kong Island.

Crisel Consunji brought the house down in her concert debut, powering through more than a dozen musical hits with all the poise of a more seasoned diva. The soprano first honed her incredible range as a teenager with theatre company Repertory Philippines, before refining it at Hong Kong’s Disneyland.

By day, Consunji is a businesswoman who runs an early childhood education centre in Wan Chai, also on Hong Kong Island. As a singer she was, before June 12, relatively unknown. Her main claim to fame was her award-winning debut as the lead actress in Still Human, a 2018 Cantonese feature film about the friendship between a Chinese man in a wheelchair and his Filipino domestic helper.

Any doubt about her voice, however, vanished soon after she appeared on stage. Accompanied by the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong (CCOHK), she sang Think of Me from The Phantom of the Opera perfectly, hitting the high notes without hesitation and resplendent in one of many locally designed gowns that she changed into over the next two hours.

She never veered too far from standard delivery – after all, this was a one-night-only concert promising one familiar tune after another. But some of the phrasings and amplifications were hers, such as the emphatic performance of Colours of the Wind, a powerful plea against racial bias despite being featured in Pocahontas, a Disney film accused of whitewashing Native American history.