Lou Diamond Phillips cast in Casa Mañana’s ‘Miss Saigon’

Texas-raised Lou Diamond Phillips has been cast in the hit musical Miss Saigon in a new production at Fort Worth’s Casa Mañana theater. Phillips, 61, graduated from high school in Corpus Christi and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in drama from the University of Texas at Arlington.

He first gained fame portraying rock-’n’-roll pioneer Ritchie Valens in the 1987 film La Bamba and has gone on to a prolific career as an award-winning actor and director.

Phillips stars in Miss Saigon as “The Engineer,” a French-Vietnamese nightclub owner. Running June 3-11, it’s a take on Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, revolving around a doomed love affair between an American Marine and a South Vietnamese girl during the Vietnam War.

Phillips is the front man of a rock band called the Pipefitters who performed as recently as 2018 in Dallas. A Filipino American, he was born into a military family on a naval base in the Philippines.

He previously appeared at Casa Mañana in 2007 in Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men. In 1996, he was nominated for a Tony Award for his lead role as King Mongkut of Siam in the Broadway revival of The King and I.

For the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, in which he played a student gangster who learns to love math from a charismatic teacher portrayed by Edward James Olmos, Phillips was nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actor and won the Independent Spirit Award.

Lou Diamond Phillips will headline Casa Mañana's production of Miss Saigon, starring as the... — Lou Diamond Phillips will headline Casa Mañana's production of Miss Saigon, starring as the French-Vietnamese owner of a Vietnam War-era nightclub.(Charles Sykes / Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

During high school and college, Phillips worked as a cook at Whataburger and at a Padre Island surf shop, he recently told Cowboys & Indians magazine, which interviewed him earlier this year about his induction into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

“My first brush with fame was making a Denver omelet for Willie Nelson who had the munchies at nine in the morning,” he said. “Imagine that? And so, it was most important omelet of my life.”

Best known for his movie and TV roles, Phillips starred in Young Guns and its sequel. In recent years, he played a lieutenant in the Fox police procedural Prodigal Son and a Cheyenne Indian named Henry Standing Bear who helps the title character, a Wyoming sheriff, solve crimes in the A&E and later Netflix modern Western series Longmire. He directed episodes of both shows.

On his many roles in Westerns, he told Cowboys & Indians, “I’ve quite often been the Native point of view, which I’m very proud of. But yeah, whether it’s Lone Rider or The Trail to Hope Rose — or one that I really loved, Angel and the Bad Man — I got to be the cowboy. And espouse a lot of virtues that you try to live by.

“As an actor playing these characters, when you’re doing that research, when you’re thinking through these characters, it’s like, Wow, I hope that’s who I am. That honesty, that integrity. I’d like to be the kind of friend that Henry Standing Bear is to Walt Longmire. And yet also the kind of friend who can stand pat and go, ‘You’re wrong,’ or, ‘No, this is what I believe.’”