Review: MISS SAIGON Gains New Relevance As Americans Debate Refugee Issues

The helicopter is real this time, as is the Asian heritage of the leading man, as Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil's Miss Saigon lands at the Broadway Theatre once more. Director Laurence Connor does a solid job of mounting producer Cameron Mackintosh's newest version, with three of its West End stars crossing the Atlantic to make their Broadway debuts.

After premiering in London in 1989, Miss Saigon ran for nearly ten years on Broadway after opening two years later. The plot is a variation of Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa's libretto for composer Giacomo Puccini's 1904 opera, "Madama Butterfly," a story that was famously ridiculed by David Henry Hwang in his play, M. BUTTERFLY, for its western view of eastern characters. While Miss Saigon has been criticized for its broad-stroke white people's vision of its Vietnamese characters, it remains extremely popular and has been championed for being a theatre piece that regularly provides employment for large numbers of actors of Asian descent.

The story begins in 1975 Saigon, just as word is spreading around the city that American troops will soon be making their exit out of the Vietnam conflict, leaving those left behind vulnerable against Viet Cong conquerors.

At a strip club where American soldiers go to let off steam and perhaps have their last go at sex before getting killed, the teenage girls who work there do their best to make their allies fall in love with them, hoping to get married and brought to the safety of the U.S., much to the consternation of The Engineer, who owns the venue and tries to keep a steady cash flow. The title refers to a nightly beauty pageant held at the club, where the price is jacked up for the winner's services.

A quick romance develops between Chris, an American sergeant who, like many back home, is unable to make any sense of his country's involvement in an unwinnable war, and Kim, a 17-year-old orphan (and a virgin) on her first night on the job.

While the first act concerns Chris' attempt to get through military red tape and bring Kim back to the states with him, the second act deals with the issue of Vietnamese children who were fathered by foreign military men who then returned to their homelands.

True to its operatic source, the sung-through drama of Miss Saigon is better conveyed via its sweeping, power-ballad-driven music than by its lyrics, penned in English by Richard Maltby, Jr. after Boublil's original French. Although there's good imagery at work when the women sing "The Movie In My Mind," a description of the domestic fantasies they play in their heads while their customers are on top of them, and when The Engineer's big number "The American Dream" has him imagining the glories of crass commercialism, the text is also loaded with pedestrian lyrics that narrate emotions, rather than expressing them, and incorporate predictable, simple rhyming.

Nevertheless, strong performances keep the proceedings stimulating, particularly that of Jon Jon Briones, especially charismatic as The Engineer, whose absent father was with the French military. While the role's award-winning originator, Jonathan Pryce, gave a flashy, highly stylized performance, there's a great deal more humanity in Briones' take. Yes, the Engineer is abusive to the women in his employ, but Briones' also shows him as desperate survivor whose motivation for anything is to somehow gain passage to America. He can be an entertaining huckster to men looking for a good time, but when alone with the audience, he confides of his lifelong struggles with sardonic humor.

Powerfully-voiced Eva Noblezada combines sensitive nobility and naiveté as Kim, and Alistair Brammer's rocker-belting Chris effectively displays the steady growth of post-traumatic stress disorder developed from his wartime experiences.

As mentioned above, set designers Totie Driver and Matt Kinley provide an actual helicopter in the musical's climactic scene depicting the American evacuation while the helpless citizens who remain beg to be rescued. Fellow designers Bruno Poet (lights), Mick Potter (sound) and Luke Halls (projections) collaborate with them on the impressive effect.

In these days when the matter of political refugees is a controversial topic, Miss Saigon gathers extra relevance. So much so that the new anachronistic lyrical reference to Donald Trump comes off as an especially cheap bit.

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