For someone who has spent much of her career stepping into other people’s stories, Nathania Ong is about to do something rather different: telling her own. The Singaporean musical theatre performer returns this September with HONEST, her first solo concert in Singapore, promising an intimate evening of musical theatre, original music and personal storytelling that traces both the trajectory of her career, as well as the experiences, relationships and questions that have shaped the person behind it.

It is a fitting moment for a performer who has spent the past several years moving between worlds. Ong has appeared in major West End productions including leading lady roles in Hamilton and Les Misérables while continuing to return to Singapore, most recently reprising the role of Eponine at Base Entertainment Asia’s Les Misérables: The Arena Spectacular, and taking on the very different challenge of Elle Woods in Singapore Repertory Theatre’s hit original production of Legally Blonde.

By almost any measure, it is a remarkable career for a performer who once considered herself, in her own words, “so average at everything”. “I really feel like singing was the only thing I had,” she says. “I loved singing, I loved performing, but I was so average at everything else. I never thought that this would be my life. I never could have dreamt or expected what I’ve managed to achieve so far.”

Growing up in Singapore, she could imagine perhaps making a living as a performer. But the idea that singing and acting might take her to some of the world’s biggest musical theatre stages was beyond what she allowed herself to envision. “Looking at the Singapore theatre industry when I was younger, I was like, ‘Maybe I can survive doing this,’” she recalls. “But I never thought that it would become this. I never could have dreamt or expected what I’ve managed to achieve so far. I’m really, really blessed.”

Even now, Ong admits that she has a slightly unusual relationship with her own milestones. She is often too busy living them to recognise their significance. “I feel like I’m one of those people where, in the moment, I can’t process anything,” she says. “I’m just there, I’m doing the thing, I’m along for the ride, and I’m just doing my best as a human to try and make the most of what I have.”

It is often other people who make her stop and recognise what has happened. “Other people’s reception has really made me feel like, ‘Oh shoot, I’ve actually done something quite special.’” she says. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, cool, I did a thing.’ And then you hear somebody else’s reaction to it and you’re like, ‘Oh. Maybe this is actually quite a big deal.’”

That perspective feels particularly relevant to HONEST, which presents a musical portrait of where Ong finds herself now. The concert features music from productions including Hamilton, Waitress, Cabaret, Wicked, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Company, alongside original material. But rather than simply presenting a collection of songs from a successful stage career, Ong has built the evening around musical storytelling.

“HONEST was very much conceived as a letter to my younger self,” she says. “I think it’s about musical storytelling through musical theatre songs, and it’s tracking my trajectory in terms of my love life. I feel like love is one of those strange concepts that everyone is trying to understand. Nobody really has a firm understanding of it, and that’s why so many songs get written about love.”

The idea of the concert initially came from a more painful place. But by the time she began shaping the show for an audience, her own circumstances had shifted. “It used to be very much like, ‘Oh, I’m so sad,’ but now the framing of HONEST has also changed from sadness and obviously from loss, but also to recovery and to hope,” she says.

Her relatively new relationship she entered, has contributed to that change in perspective. “When I was conceptualising HONEST, I was in a very different headspace,” she says. “It’s really nice to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel at some point, or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s to never stop hoping and never stop dreaming.”

And while love provides one of the show’s central threads, Ong is quick to point out that HONEST is about more than romantic relationships, and also about dreams, self-worth and learning to understand who you are when the thing you do is no longer enough to define you. That is a lesson she has had to learn herself. “I spent a lot of my earlier life terrified of myself,” she says.

It is a striking admission from someone who now performs for thousands of adoring fans and people and has built a career around standing in front of audiences. But Ong remembers a time when attention could feel less like affirmation and more like exposure. A video of her singing went viral and helped put her on the map, but the sudden visibility was not something she found easy to embrace.

“I was terrified,” she says. “I couldn’t read the comment section because there was so much comparison on there as well. It really just takes one of those comments to just plummet my full day and wipe all of those positive things out the window.”

The problem went beyond the criticism. It was also about how there was fear that other people’s opinions could become the measure by which she understood herself. “I was afraid to take up space,” she says. “I was terrified of my voice. I didn’t want people to hear what I had to say. And I didn’t believe in what I had to say.”

That has changed considerably. Her years in the UK, growing older and gaining experience have all contributed to a greater sense of confidence. So, too, did her time playing Eliza in Hamilton, a character whose grace, strength and kindness affected Ong beyond the stage. “I started to find my own voice as well and to be less afraid of the fact that I can actually have a say, I can have a seat at the table too,” she says.

The experience also prompted her to volunteer more regularly in the UK, another way in which a role began influencing the person playing it. For Ong, that movement towards finding her voice is inseparable from the central message of HONEST. “It’s so easy to attach yourself and your self-worth to what you do, rather than who you are,” she says. “If I had let people who said, ‘Theatre is not a career, it’s a terrible investment, you can’t make money out of it,’ dictate my self-worth, I wouldn’t have gotten here.”

Instead, she has had to learn that her career can be part of her identity without becoming the entirety of it. “You are not what you do, you are who you are,” she says.

That distinction has perhaps become even more important as she has spent years living far from home. Ong still considers Singapore home, even as much of her professional life remains based in the UK. “I very much view it as my home,” she says. “I call myself a double agent because I’m living half my life in the UK and half my life here.”

She admits that maintaining friendships across continents is not always easy. “I’m not the best at maintaining contact over long distances,” she says. “But my friends and my family understand that. Every time I go to the UK and I meet up with my friends, or vice versa, if I come back to Singapore and I speak to my friends, it just feels like I’ve never left. It feels like just picking up where we left off.”

Returning to perform here, however, does feel different from when she was younger. Much of Ong’s early stage experience in Singapore came through amateur productions. Now, she returns with years of professional experience in a very different theatre environment behind her. “When I step on the stage here, it feels like people want to listen, which is nice,” she says.

That is not something she has always taken for granted. “In the UK, sometimes I still ask myself, ‘Do they want to hear me today?’” she says. “And I think in Singapore, because of the support that I’ve had from people here and because people know me, it gives me a little bit more permission to take up space.”

For her, that is part of the continuing process of owning her voice. “To step on stage and to own the stage and to own my space.”

It is also why performing as herself in HONEST feels different from playing a character. Ong loves inhabiting other people’s stories, but a solo concert gives her an unusual opportunity to connect with audiences without the protective layer of a character.

“I love character work, but I think performing as myself gives me a much bigger opportunity to connect with the audiences who have supported me,” she says. “If I’ve gone through these experiences, and I’ve learnt these things, and someone else can glean something from it that might impact their life, then that’s really meaningful to me.”

There are layers of meaning for curious newcomers, staunch fans, as well as her closest friends, with plenty of Easter eggs and references for those who have been following her journey. “You gotta be following,” she laughs. “Loyalty pays off.”

The intimacy also extends to what she has chosen not to reveal. Ong describes herself as a private person, and HONEST is not intended to be an unfiltered account of her entire life. Instead, she sees it as a small collection of memories, something audiences are invited to hold for an evening. “It’s like a secret shared between friends,” she says. “It’s this teeny tiny little memory box where you can pull out these memories and hopefully they start something in you.”

That may be one reason she has no plans for the concert to be professionally recorded or filmed. There is something about the ephemeral nature of a live performance that suits what she is trying to create. HONEST is intended to exist in the room, in the moment. And for Ong, there is another kind of risk involved in performing original material.

The title song, HONEST, has been sitting in her voice notes for more than two years. It is a more personal expression of her musical identity, drawing on the R&B and blues influences she enjoys listening to. Even her own family has not heard it. “I hope people are surprised by HONEST because even my family hasn’t heard it,” she says. “It’s been very much lock and key because it’s so vulnerable.”

She is deliberately using the concert as a test. “I’m kind of using HONEST as a pilot to see if people enjoy the songs that I make as well,” she says. “I want to see whether this is something that I should be moving towards, whether I should be a musical artist as well as being a musical theatre singer. I want honest feedback.”

There is already a larger version of that musical future in her head. The challenge, she says, is finding the right people to help her turn it into reality. “Even this concert is like a 2.0 of the version that I want it to be,” she says. “It’s not exactly the master copy of what I have in my mind.”

The same self-awareness extends to the music she has released previously. Ong looks back on her earlier work with a mixture of affection and frustration, recognising that she simply wasn’t the same artist then. “I was annoyed at myself for not investing enough of myself,” she admits. “I was a lazy-ass kid and didn’t want to camp out in a studio and do all these things. There were a few good songs that came out of that. I don’t hate the fact that I did that album, but at this point I’m a very different person.”

Now, she says, she is still figuring out what her voice actually sounds like.“I’m finding my voice and my sound, shaped by my life experiences, the things I’m listening to, my brain, and whatever I can glean and manage.”

She recalls watching an interview with the late Alan Rickman in which he discussed becoming a better actor by expanding one’s worldview by learning about politics, experiencing different cultures and encountering different ways of seeing the world. It is an idea that still resonates with Ong now, and the more she lives, the more she has to draw from.

And that is why she sees HONEST not as a definitive statement about who she is, but as a marker along the way. “HONEST is the culmination of that journey up to now,” she says. “It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s a bookmark of where I am at the moment.”

The word “bookmark” feels particularly apt. Ong had initially imagined 2026 as something of a sabbatical year. Instead, it has turned into another unexpected chapter, and another period in which plans have shifted, opportunities have appeared and life has refused to follow a neat trajectory.

She is not entirely sure what 2027 will look like either. At this point, she’s expressed a love to return to London and see what opportunities might be waiting there. But she is also interested in expanding beyond the stage, exploring television and film acting, motion capture and voiceover work.

There are “small inklings” pulling her in different directions, she says, but they all circle back to the same core interests: singing, acting and creating. That uncertainty does not seem to frighten her in quite the way it once might have, and if anything, there is a greater willingness now to see where the work takes her.

“At any one point in time, no single country could sustain a performer for the entirety of their life,” she says. “So I go where the work takes me. If there is more work in Singapore, then there’s more reason for me to come back to Singapore.”

That flexibility may be one of the defining characteristics of her next chapter. Because Nathania is no longer trying to prove that she belongs in one particular box. West End performer. Singaporean performer. Musical theatre actress. Singer. Potential screen actor. Songwriter. Producer.

HONEST itself has given her a taste of the latter. Although she has a small team around her, much of the production has involved Ong taking a heavier hand than she has before, learning everything from music rights and AELs and PELs to the practicalities of putting on a concert.

It has been a crash course in the less glamorous side of being an artist. “It’s mostly just me,” she says. “There are some people behind the scenes who have helped me, and I had a co-producer helping me at the beginning. SRT has helped me with some of the technical stuff and setup and introducing me to people.”

The experience has made her appreciate just how much goes into making a show happen, particularly when you are, in effect, the product being sold. “Advertising is difficult because it’s just me,” she jokes.

But the response has been much better than she initially feared. She had worried that only a tiny audience might turn up. Instead, ticket sales for the Friday and Saturday performances have exceeded her expectations. That, too, has become part of the strange experience of watching a career grow.

The person who once struggled to read comments on a viral video is now putting her name on a solo concert and asking audiences to come not merely to see her perform, but to listen to what she has to say. There is a vulnerability in that which cannot be completely hidden behind choreography, costumes or another character. “If you come to watch HONEST, you’ll come to know me better,” she says.

But at the end of the day, Ong hopes audiences leave with something more valuable than simply a better understanding of her biography. “I would hope audiences walk out feeling inspired, that they dare to dream and that the dream is achievable,” she says. “I want them to feel that they’re not alone in this life and that there’s so much more.”

She knows this because she has been on the receiving end of that feeling herself. There have been performances that moved her unexpectedly, moments in a theatre when someone else’s story or song has shifted something inside her. She wants HONEST to offer that possibility to someone else, and not necessarily about everyone understanding her. “It isn’t for everyone,” she says. “But for people who have a similar view to me, they’ll find resonance in seeing how it’s very important to maintain all those things and it’s something I have at the crux of myself.”

What matters is that the audience finds something of themselves in it. Perhaps that is why the concert’s title is multifold, and not just about telling personal stories. For Ong, honesty is about having the courage to acknowledge what you want, even when the answer is inconvenient, frightening or different from what you thought you were supposed to want. “We could all do with a little more being honest with ourselves and seeing ourselves for who we are in the mirror,” she says. “Even being honest about, ‘Hey, I wanted chai tow kueh and not japchae.’”

She laughs. “Just being honest about what you want and going for it.”

For a performer who once says she was terrified of her own voice, it is perhaps the simplest and most revealing statement she could make. This time, Nathania Ong isn’t stepping into somebody else’s story: she’s taking up the space to tell her own.

Nathania Ong – HONEST: Live In Concert plays at the KC Arts Centre from 11th to 13th September 2026. Tickets available from BookMyShow