On last week’s episode of The Pitt, Isa Briones sang a lullaby to baby Jane Doe which went viral with Filipino viewers worldwide who recognized the song as a traditional Filipino lullaby. Many (non-Filipino) viewers were not aware that Isa is a Broadway star who has been singing for most of her life and the daughter of two musical theater actors.
Isa’s father Jon Jon was an engineering student in the Philippines when he auditioned for a new musical called Miss Saigon in 1988. He was cast in the original West End production as an ensemble member. After three years in the London show, he joined the German tour as a swing and an understudy, which is where he met Isa’s mother, Megan Johnson. When he returned to the West End production in 1998, he was the alternate for the Engineer (one of the starring roles). Isa was born in London just a few months before the show closed in 1999 (I swear there is a picture of Jon Jon and baby Isa on the stage taken when the show closed but I can’t find it). When the show reopened on the West End in 2014, Jon Jon starred as the Engineer. When the show transferred to Broadway in 2017, he made his Broadway debut as the Engineer, almost thirty years after his Miss Saigon journey began.
Isa inherited her parents’ musical talents and her parents supported her love of singing. Isa said that it was a privilege to have a family who encouraged her love of theater and performing. Above is a 12 year old Isa performing Castle on a Cloud from Les Misérables
She appeared in local productions of Evita and Next to Normal before she was cast on Star Trek: Picard, where she sang a version of Blue Skies, a call back to Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. When she was 19, she starred as Peggy/Maria in the first national tour of Hamilton (becoming the youngest actor cast in Hamilton history). In 2024, she and her father were cast in the Broadway production of Hadestown.
While filming season 2 of The Pitt, creator/writer Scott Gemmill asked Isa if she would feel comfortable singing a lullaby to baby Jane Doe in an upcoming episode. When she told her dad about the context of the scene, he sent her a Filipino lullaby sung in Tagalog by Lea Salonga (who starred in the original West End production of Miss Saigon with Jon Jon).
The song, Ili Ili Tulog Anay, is a traditional Hiligaynon lullaby that originated in Iloilo (in the Visayan region of the Philippines) and is usually sung by an older sister or female relative. The lyrics tell the baby to sleep while its mother is away. Some viewers have talked about mentioned that this song is especially apropos to use on The Pitt because many Filipino women leave the Philippines to work as nurses in the United States. The reaction to Isa singing this song has been huge because so many Filipinos recognized it and remembered it being sung to them when they were children.
Jon Jon and the interviewer, Yong Chavez, talks about other Filipino lullabies, including one that was originally written for fisherman going out to sea but became popular during the Marcos era due to fathers leaving their families to join the revolution.
Isa talks about playing Santos and how it’s progress that she can play a flawed character. She is not fluent in Tagalog so some of the words in the lullaby were unfamiliar to her, but she is learning more Tagalog through Rosetta Stone. She says the lullaby scene allowed Santos to be vulnerable and share a part of her culture. She talks about how Santos has put up walls because she learned as a child that people aren’t safe and not to trust them and that people are going to not love her. She says it’s sad that the only person in the entire ER who Santos can only let her guard down with is this baby.
Child labor laws are very strict for filming, so they used three different babies to play baby Jane Doe in the lullaby scene. Normally when filming a scene with two characters, there is coverage on one actor and then coverage with the other actor. Because they were working with a baby (who obviously does not take direction), the priority was getting good shots with the baby.
