Theatre in Review: Miss Saigon (Broadway Theatre)

	Eva Noblezada, Alistair Brammer. Photo: Michael Le Poer Trench.

When Miss Saigon opened on Broadway in 1992, it seemed too soon for a big, bombastic, romantic musical about the American misadventure in Vietnam. In 2017, it still seems too soon. Shall we try again in 2042?

Yes, yes, I know; Miss Saigon enjoyed a blockbuster run the first time around, and has attained modern-classic status. Clearly, it is making someone happy; at the performance I attended, Laurence Connor's new production was greeted with lusty bravos. There's no reason not to believe that it might settle in for another prolonged stay -- which is fine, as long as you know what to expect.

When it was first staged in London in 1989, the notion of a musical about the Vietnam War seemed rather daring; the premise -- reimagining Puccini's Madama Butterfly in Saigon just before the American withdrawal in 1975 -- had a certain logic to it. And its creators, composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and librettist Alain Boublil, were hardly afraid of taking a risk. Only a few seasons before, the idea of a musical based on Victor Hugo's Les Misérables seemed like a joke, only to become one of the era's defining hits. Still, the question persisted: Would Broadway audiences flock to a musical set against the backdrop of their country's single lost war?

As it happens, they would, if the show was a stolid operetta that offered its leads plenty of opportunities to belt to the high heavens. (Anna Russell's famous comment -- "That's the beauty of grand opera: You can do anything so long as you sing it." -- is equally applicable to '80s-era pop operas.) The libretto is loaded with hoary, only-in-musical theatre dramatic developments. The leads -- Kim, who has been forced into working as a bar girl, and Chris, a battle-scarred American solider -- fall in love over the course of one night and "marry" the next day in a Buddhist ceremony, attended by all her friends. (That she has friends at all makes little sense, since she started working at the bar only a day earlier, but there you are.) Chris plans to take Kim back to America -- we never learn if he has begun the paperwork for this -- but it all goes wrong when the evacuation of Saigon is abruptly moved ahead, thus setting off a chain of circumstances that ends in tragedy.

Schönberg's score is unfailingly melodic -- the ballad "The Last Night of the World" has a way of sticking in your head for days -- but it doesn't add the requisite gravity and dramatic heft to such potboiler plotting. This is not for lack of trying. Number after number is pitched at finale level, each one more morose than its predecessor: "The Movie in My Mind," in which Kim and one of her bar colleagues dream of escaping their sordid existence; "Why God Why?," featuring Chris agonizing over his feelings for Kim; "I Still Believe," in which Kim and Ellen, Chris' American wife, bare their mutual devotion to Chris; and "I'd Give My Life for You," Kim's declaration of devotion to Tam, her son by Chris. As the titles suggest, the lyrics are distressingly generic, despite the presence of the great Richard Maltby, Jr. as co-lyricist.

It doesn't help that the characters are mostly one-dimensional and prone to dramatic flip-flops. We are repeatedly told that Chris is tormented by his wartime experiences, but you mostly have to take that on faith, as the show largely remains mum about them. John, Chris' friend, spends much of the first act whoring in the bar where Kim works, only to turn up at the top of Act II as the show's voice of conscience, delivering the number "Bui Doi," about the left-behind children of American servicemen. Kim is a steadfast vessel of suffering throughout, living on the streets as the Communist regime comes to power and, later, escaping to Bangkok, where she works as a pole dancer. The show plays the martyr card too insistently in the climax when -- if you're one of the three people on the planet who don't know how Miss Saigon turns out, skip the rest of this graph -- Kim, determined that Chris and Ellen will take Tam back to the US, shoots herself with her little boy in the next room, thereby guaranteeing that he will be traumatized for life.

Still, if you're a fan of Miss Saigon, this is a first-class revival, both in terms of its cast and production values. Jon Jon Briones jump-starts each of his scenes as the Engineer, the sinister, Fagin-like pimp who keeps Kim ensnared in a web of corruption, his glad-handing style with customers starkly contrasted with his brutal handling of the women in his stable. When the Communists come to power, his survival instincts, vividly evoked in the number "If You Want to Die in Bed," go into high gear, using Kim as a pawn in a plan to escape to Thailand. Briones also makes the most of the Act II showstopper, "The American Dream," taking command of a Cadillac (complete with female passenger in white, floor-length fur) and singing of the joys of plastic surgery and sex for sale. (These two numbers, which surely reflect Maltby's contributions, have a Brecht-and-Weill acidity missing elsewhere in the score.)

As Kim, the most put-upon heroine in modern musical theatre, Eva Noblezada displays an inner strength that makes her years-long devotion to the absent Chris seem like something more than a desperate illusion; she also makes you believe that Kim would commit murder to keep her boy safe. The role is hugely demanding, yet she delivers her numbers with impressive stamina. Chris is an utterly thankless role, but Alistair Brammer keeps him from seeming impossibly weak-willed and selfish; he also sings with bravado. Providing solid support are Nicholas Christopher as John (who is saddled with "Bui Doi," a manipulative number accompanied by a film montage, by Luke Halls, of cute little Vietnamese-American kids); Katie Rose Clarke, bringing a welcome touch of decency as Ellen; and Devin Ilaw as Thuy, Kim's intended, by way of an arrangement between their two families, who remains obsessed with her even after he becomes a Communist Party functionary.

Bob Avian's musical staging, with additional contributions by Geoffrey Garratt, remains effective, the high points being "The American Dream," a nightmarish capitalist reverie featuring the head of Lady Liberty and a chorus of men in blue bell-bottomed tuxedos and bikinied women in huge feather hats, and "The Morning of the Dragon," a Communist pageant complete with mask of Ho Chi Minh's face and an enormous paper dragon. Connor's direction is at its strongest in creating tableaux of human misery: In the musical's most celebrated scene, as Saigon falls, a helicopter hovers over the stage, with desperate Vietnamese huddled against a barrier, desperately trying to break through.

Here, as elsewhere, the scenery, by Totie Driver and Matt Kinley, based on a concept by the late Adrian Vaux, includes the seedy Saigon bar where the Engineer presides, a gaudy forest of electric signs on a street in Bangkok's red-light district, an Asian-themed hotel room, and the hovel where Kim lives after the Communists take over. Bruno Poet's lighting creates a variety of sinister chiaroscuro looks; his skillful work is crucial to pulling off the helicopter scene. The costumes, by Andreane Neofitou, range from GI wear to skimpy bar-girl outfits to the intentionally tacky finery in "The American Dream." Mick Potter's sound design is perfectly intelligible at all times; he also provides disturbingly real helicopter sounds that pan through the auditorium.

Clearly, Miss Saigon works for a great many people, all of whom should be grateful for this lovingly staged revival. As someone who grew up in the Vietnam era, this treatment of that tumultuous period, no matter how well-intentioned, continues to strike me as thoroughly false, a weepie that doesn't begin to grapple with the political and social realities that devastated one nation and tore another apart. The sufferings of Kim and Chris don't begin to describe what really happened in that tragic time and place. -- David Barbour