A funny thing happened to MISS SAIGON on the way to Broadway–it was overtaken by reality. The show’s impact has been blunted, not because the Persian Gulf War exorcised the ghost of Vietnam, as President Bush proclaimed. Rather, the aftermath of the gulf war has churned up such tragedy that the pop emotions generated by “Miss Saigon” suddenly seem compromised, discredited. Nightly we see on our TV sets another show (Broadway PR types might call it “Mr. and Mrs. Kurdistan”) with crowd scenes that dwarf those in “Miss Saigon,” with desperate Third World people once again begging Americans not to desert them. The TV image of the young Kurdish father swearing to kill himself if he can’t find his lost family overwhelms the stage image of “Miss Saigon’s” Vietnamese heroine who does kill herself so that her little boy can find life in America.
Not everyone in the huge Broadway audience that “Miss Saigon” is almost certain to attract will feel this way, of course. The show is already a legend:it’s grossed over $33 million since it opened in London in September 1989, and the Broadway production, with its record cost of $10 million (and a top ticket price of $100), has an advance sale approaching $37 million. The team that created “Les Miserables”–British producer Cameron Mackintosh and the French composer-lyricist duo of Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil–has shown audacity in creating a “tragic” quasi-operatic musical with the contemporary theme of the Vietnam War. But “Miss Saigon” is built on dangerous ground, the Madame Butterfly, with its doomed love affair between Kim (Lea Salonga), a teenage Saigon bar girl, and Chris (Willy Falk) and American GI who leaves her behind, not knowing she’s pregnant with his child. Three years later Chris returns with an American wife (Liz Callaway), leading to the self-sacrifice of Kim so that Chris will take the child.
As a metaphor for East-West relations, the Butterfly story is a threadbare embarrassment. What works for “Miss Saigon” is a the professionalism of its creative team as assembled by Mackintosh. Schoenberg and Boublil (with Colyricist Richard Maltby Jr.) have formed an eclectic pop musical style that’s accessible to audiences from Broadway to Budapest to Tokyo. Production designer John Napier, who created a feline cosmos for “Cats” and a Parisian insurrection for “Les Miserables,” outdoes himself with an ear-rattling helicopter that descends to remove the last Americans from Saigon in 1975. Bob Avian’s musical staging ranges from the sinuous B-girls in the fleshpots of Saigon to a horde of robotically marching Viet Cong. Director Nicholas Hytner deploys the huge show with structured energy, from the saturnalia of the brothel-bars to intimate scenes between Kim and Chris.
What this all adds up to is an odd combination: the spectacle is high tech, the emotional level is pure D.W. Griffith in its ingenuous simplicity. But the days of that genius of popular culture are long past; things are more complicated now. “Miss Saigon” sound only two true emotional chords. One is the sweetness and gallantry of Salonga, the young Filipina who sings and acts with remarkable power. The other authentic feeling is the sheer lust for “The American Dream” of the Eurasian pimp called The Engineer, played with Brechtian brilliance by Jonathan Pryce (whom Actors’ Equity tried ill advisedly to bar from Broadway, insisting the role should be played by an Asian.) Hands slithering like snakes, eyes darting like a jackal’s Pryce sings his showstopping anthem of evil entrepreneurship:“Perfume can cover a stench/That’s what I learned from the French…I can sell shit and get thanks/That’s what I learned from the Yanks” and then makes lubricious love to a white Cadillac carrying a bimbo dressed as the Staute of Liberty.
Reviewing the London production I credited the creators of “Miss Saigon” with “honorable manipulation” of showbiz with the shock of reality. As the world stage displays the naked agony of another Eastern culture, “Miss Saigon’s” pop myth of Vietnam, whose people are shown as whores, pimps, murderous communists or hapless victims, is hard to swallow. Had they chosen a more profound symbol for their theme than the bedraggled Butterfly, “Miss Saigon’s” gifted creators might have looked more like prophets than profiteers.
