Direct from its smash London run, Cameron Mackintosh's stunning new production of Boublil and Schonberg's legendary musical Miss Saigon lands on Broadway in March, 2017, featuring its acclaimed stars Eva Noblezada and Jon Jon Briones.
Set in 1975 during the final days of the American occupation of Saigon, Miss Saigon is an epic love story about the relationship between an American GI and a young Vietnamese woman. Orphaned by war, 17-year-old Kim is forced to work as a bar girl in a sleazy Saigon nightclub, owned by a notorious wheeler-dealer known as "The Engineer." John, an American GI, buys his friend Chris the services of Kim for the night- a night that will change their lives forever.
Don't miss this "thrilling, soaring and spectacular" (The Times of London) musical when it returns to Broadway this spring for a limited engagement.
Is it impossible to find the entertainment in Miss Saigon, the epic musical that follows the tragedy of a virginal Vietnamese woman who falls for an American G.I. just as Saigon is falling in 1975, and the sacrifice she makes to ensure their son has the life she desires for him? As evidenced by the laughter and weepy sniffles around me a few nights ago: no. Many in the audience clapped loudly, stood, and cheered this revival (transferred from London and produced by Cameron Mackintosh). But watching this grandly designed and mounted Broadway show-first produced in London in 1989-especially in light of the fraught and charged debate around immigration and refugees, with its full retinue of racial stereotypes unchanged, is a bizarre confluence of opposites; like sunbathing on a bright sunny beach which is freezing cold, or drinking a banana milkshake and it tasting of garden weeds.
To be fair, the American figures are just as laughable and flat as their Vietnamese counterparts (let's not forget that Frenchmen wrote this and the British produced it). Les Misérables is also broad and melodramatic, but a better source and greater historical distance mitigates its sanctimonious patches. However, like Les Miz, Miss Saigon is ultimately stranded between extremes of cynicism and idealism: the Engineer's cartoonish hunger for American-style excess versus Kim's bland, maternal purity. What's lost in between is humanity or ambiguity, songs to tell us more about the characters' past, their quirks or inner nuances. Instead, stereotyped villains and victims shout-sing at each others' faces or collapse and bellow, 'Nooooo!' (twice). Diversity on Broadway should be celebrated, but give actors of color characters we all can care about.
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