Lea Michele revisits her roots at Broadway's Imperial Theatre

Lea Michele was just a kid actor backstage at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway when she first heard a song from the musical “Chess” on a stereo. Some three decades later, she finds herself singing that same tune in the same theatre. The “Glee” and Broadway veteran, who got her professional start in “Les Misérables” at age 8, has returned, now a mother and a bankable star, to her old stomping grounds, which coincidentally is the very theater where “Chess” made its debut in 1988.

- Associated Press

“The Imperial Theatre really has a soul. Every show that’s ever been in it is absorbed in the walls. It’s a little eerie, but very powerful. Other theaters can feel a little sterile, but this does not feel that way,” she says. She remembers exactly where she sat the first time she saw “Les Misérables” — orchestra left, six rows in — hearing Paige O'Hara as Fantine sing “I Dreamed a Dream” in the musical that she would soon join, playing Young Cosette and Young Eponine.

“I was in the show and I told my parents, I said ‘I love this. I want to do this for the rest of my life.’ And it’s really very emotional to be here 30 years later still working, thank God, back at this theater,” she says. The icing on the cake? An electrician on her return simply said: “Welcome home.”