I was both excited and nervous to see Miss Saigon. Excited because it is a musical by Claude-Michael Schönberg and Alain Boublil, the team that created Les Mis; nervous because they are white men writing about Vietnamese characters, their relationship to America, and the Vietnam War. I was right to be both.
Miss Saigon is therefore a complicated musical for me that I find I like and dislike in about equal measure. A transplant of the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly, already a pretty problematic source, from imperial Japan to wartime Vietnam, it is the love story of a poor Vietnamese prostitute and an American G.I., and her attempts to reunite with him in the years following his discharge. It premiered in 1989, so naturally the version I watched was the recorded 25th anniversary show in 2014 at the Prince Edward Theatre in the West End, and we’ll talk about the problems with that later. Firstly, the shows’ plot is rather typical and rather typically melancholy for stories about abandoned war mistresses. I mean if you’re at all familiar with the Puccini story, you’ll know that this is a tragedy. And there’s a history of stories like this being used as a tool of white supremacy. The show is not in the least bit Vietnamese, or Asian. It is entirely a western portrait of that world and the people from it, and the character types and culture are if not brazenly derogatory, then uncomfortably orientalist.
Furthermore, from the show writers’ perspective it’s very easy to see Miss Saigon as the end result of their realization that the arguably most beloved part of Les Mis was the brief story of Fantine and the “I Dreamed a Dream” song; and thus deciding to make their next musical just a two and a half hour version of that. Parts of Kims’ story are literally just extrapolations from the lines in that song. That’s a lot of misery to carry an entire musical, even in a genre that kind of needs a lot of angst. And it does get wearisome after a time. Yet I also found myself honestly compelled by it. Whatever the racialized or sexist implications around her, Kim is a character very easy to empathize with and root for. And the hardship of the journey she sees herself undertaking is dramatic enough. But more than that I think it came down to the performance, and I’ve concluded that Miss Saigon more or less lives or dies on the strength of its’ lead.
Maybe that is why it has managed to last so long, because in spite of everything, the show has been led by good talent. Lea Salonga originated the part of Kim, and I’m familiar enough with her work to know she must have been great. The 90’s touring production featured Deedee Magno Hall, Pearl from Steven Universe, in the role -so obviously I would have enjoyed that as well. And this revival, in both the West End and Broadway, was the debut of a young actress only eighteen at the time, Eva Noblezada -and she is spectacular. She’s since gone on to comparable success as Eurydice in the much-acclaimed Hadestown, and watching her here makes me even more excited to see that show someday. She carries the whole production on her shoulders and every morsel of emotional torment so well, that the character problems feel less apparent. Her youth seems stark at the beginning, almost uncomfortably close to the sexually exploited seventeen year old she plays, but she matures over the course of show as she portrays the depth of the years she’s suffered and the choices she’s made to reach first a better life for herself, and then for her son. She alone sells the love between Kim and the American lieutenant Chris in a series of sentimental moments she performs truthfully enough to remain just the right side of sappy.
She’s paired with a bombastic Jon Jon Briones (who I’m just now learning is the father of Isa Briones from Star Trek: Picard!) as the only other character in the show with much development or worthwhile material, the Engineer -her callous and distasteful pimp. Briones is a consummate performer, having a lot of fun as his energy reverberates through the stage and screen (he’s also surely much better in the role than the original whitewashing performance by Jonathan Pryce). But the Engineer is a very unpleasant and arguably more racially insensitive character than Kim. He is a lecherous louse desperately trying to get a visa to go to America -he has very much bought into the America Dream, of which he’s got a song about that undercuts the minuscule development he’s made by the late stages of the second act. He does have his funny moments, made better by the way Briones plays them, but he still ultimately feels like a side character given too much attention. Especially when the show would be much better off fleshing out Chris more -for what is there, Alistair Brammer does an adequate job.
He also gets one of the more memorable songs of the piece, “Why, God, Why?” and a few other good duets with Kim, “Sun and Moon” and “Last Night of the World”. Generally the show has a lot of nice songs but not many that will stick with you, certainly not in the way EVERY number from Schönberg and Boublil’s last musical did. Among the exceptions are “The Movie in My Mind”, “If You Want to Die in Bed”, and “I’d Give My Life for You”-maybe the most well-known from this musical. Honestly most of the songs that Kim partakes in to some degree are worth listening to divorced from the musical. However I do find the musical aesthetic a little bit at odds with the setting. A lot of the songs have, if not that grandiose feel, then an operatic attitude that characterized many of the numbers in Les Mis -rhythms and motifs that feel very classical. And yet the story is of course set in 1975 Saigon. Maybe I’m just conditioned to associate this environment with protest rock, but it seems odd to me that there isn’t really much of that represented in the shows’ music (plenty of Oriental riff though) when the lyrics are often viscerally modern -sort of the reverse of the style of Hamilton it comes across.
And speaking of Hamilton, I was longing for the kind of relative technical prowess that had been brought to that Disney recording. Because how producer Cameron Mackintosh and director Brett Sullivan decided to shoot and edit this production is frequently abysmal. More than any recording of a musical I’ve seen so far, this one was the most desperate to look like a movie. Not only does it edit in visual references such as war photographs I doubt were present in the actual show, but short of applauses after each number, it refuses to let you know there even is an audience. Scenes that encompass the width of the stage or the number “I Still Believe” in which a duet is performed a world apart, are superimposed against each other. That’s not what we want from a filmed stage show! We want to feel like we’re actually there, the artificiality is a central part of the charm! And if it’s bad enough the naked attempt to mimic filmmaking and hide any theatrical identity, it’s not even good filmmaking at that. The cuts in ensemble scenes are too often frenetic and haphazard, as though Sullivan is trying to show everything that’s happening on stage at once. This is particularly egregious in the opening numbers, where the cuts take on an uncomfortably voyeuristic purpose. Even close-ups, a necessary choice given the medium, are relied on too much, and the final shot is an overhead pan-out that could almost be comical.
It is not of course. It merely underlines the disheartening ending I had been hoping the show would circumvent with an appropriate unintentional punchline. Maybe it was the shows’ general acclaim that had me convinced it would not end in a depressing meaningless death, but it’s there anyway. Obviously it’s not the first of its’ kind in a Schönberg and Boublil musical, but the deaths of Fantine or Eponine (similarly dying for love) were at least illustrative of something, and didn’t play into a long history of racist coding that props up white purity. It’s disappointing, and aside from the connotations, just leaves the show feeling empty.
A small comfort is the fact that Miss Saigon at least provides opportunities for Asian actors in musicals, a rarity still in the theatre industry, even if actual Vietnamese actors and singers remain relatively left out. As Noblezada and Briones prove, hell as Salonga and Magno Hall do before them, it’s a good exhibition vehicle from which to launch great talent. Many of the songs are still very good on their own merits, and again a really impressive Kim can make the experience of watching the show at least worthwhile. But I can’t see myself returning to Miss Saigon under other circumstances.
I was in London when this production was recorded, regularly visiting the West End in fact. And I remember seeing a lot of ads in Piccadilly Circus, in tube stations, and around the city, unaware of what Miss Saigon was. I try to imagine how I would react if I had been there, seen it live, as a still impressionable twenty-two year old not considering the politics of media and lacking the critical thinking skills I have since learned. When I do, I think I understand in some small way the popularity it has achieved.
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