CRITICS have long raced to write the obituary to Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s “Miss Saigon,” the West End and Broadway hit that catapulted the Philippines’s very own Lea Salonga into international stardom. The Vietnam War-era tale, they complained, made Asian women tawdry, feeble, and opportunistic.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen lamented in a column that the show had perpetuated a fantasy that female Asians coveted powerful men from the West for shelter and protection. “Now, it’s ‘Miss Saigon’s’ turn to die,” he wrote in The New York Times in 2019.
Half a decade later, the musical is neither dead nor even terminally ill.
A second production of “Miss Saigon” arrived in the Philippines in March, 25 years since Salonga dazzled Filipino audiences with her performance in the titular role of Kim in the musical’s maiden run at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
Filipino-Australian actress Abigail Adriano took the mantle this time, portraying a teenage waif who works as a prostitute in Saigon during a time of political upheaval.
Adriano has big shoes to fill. Salonga clinched a Tony in 1991 for best performance by a leading actress in a musical. Eva Noblezada, the Filipino-American actress who starred at the West End revival in 2014, earned a Tony nomination in 2017. Joanna Ampil conquered the original United Kingdom run in 2001.
In an interview with the Varsitarian, Adriano said she tried to bring justice to the role by understanding the nuances and motivations of her character.
“One thing that’s helped me execute the role […] is remembering that the story I’m telling is a story that many women are going through,” she said. “A way that I make my character my own is bringing myself to the character and staying honest and true to the important story that I’m telling.”
“Miss Saigon” integrated the horrors of the Vietnam War with the premise of Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” The musical follows Kim and the painful decision to give away her daughter to his ex-partner, American Marine Sergeant Chris Scott, in the hopes of providing the child a better life in the United States.
The new Kim
The nascent thespian certainly proved her mettle. With only one credited role, in the 2019 science-fiction drama “The Unlisted,” the Filipino-Australian actress brought to life a respectable version of Kim.
Adriano commanded the stage and exhibited emotions that touched audiences, even those sitting in the farthest rows.
Bringing Kim to life requires a cosmic amount of rawness as misfortune after misfortune befalls the poor waif. The misery inside “Dreamland,” a bar in Saigon. Escaping an arranged marriage with a soon-to-be official of the Communist Party. Killing that official. The failure to leave the hell of Saigon. The suicide that ends all affliction.
Kim’s rage and tenacity all intersect in Adriano’s eyes and voice quality. When Kim and her son, Tam, run away from the torment in Saigon to seek refuge in Bangkok, Adriano’s eyes pop up in a mix of courage and fury while belting “I’d Give My Life for You” to conclude the first act. It’s as raw as one can get.
Redefining ‘The Engineer’
“Miss Saigon” opened on Broadway in 1991 to great controversy and anticipation. British actor Jonathan Pryce, who played the role of The Engineer, was accused of yellowface at the West End run after wearing prosthetics that altered the shape of his eyes and the color of his skin. He did not do it again when the musical arrived in the United States.
Whatever misgivings about the yellowface controversy quickly vanished. Critics were swooned by Pryce’s performance. “Mr. Pryce […] makes disingenuousness as electrifying as Miss Salonga’s ingenuousness,” columnist Frank Rich hailed in his review.
It’s a tough act to follow for Seann Miley Moore.
Moore is a Filipino-Australian singer and an openly queer performer who shined and slayed as the lead actor of “Miss Saigon.” He injected energy and pizazz into his character as The Engineer.
The Engineer has no race or sexuality, only a modus operandi. As a hustler and a pimp, his greatest desire is to meet Uncle Sam.
The flexibility of The Engineer paved the way for “Miss Saigon” to feature different character actors for the role. Pryce appeared in both West End and Broadway runs, earning him a Tony in 1991. Jon Jon Briones, a Filipino actor who crawled his way into Hollywood, owned the role for more than a decade – at the second UK tour (2006) and revivals at West End (2014) and Broadway (2017). Ampil broke ceilings by becoming the first woman to be The Engineer in the musical’s history.
Flamboyance worked well for Moore. The engineer possessed the strongest fervor to escape war-torn Vietnam and live in the land of milk and honey.
Near the end of the second act, Moore swayed, twitched, danced atop a vintage car, and spanked his butt to proclaim his “American Dream.” He deserved an ovation for his audacity.
The fall of Saigon
John Napier was the production designer enlisted to recreate Vietnam in the Broadway run of “Miss Saigon.” A critic proclaimed him to be the real star.
“With its semitransparent, variously shaped drops flying in and out, huge mock-Oriental paper curtains rising and falling, and smoky, hallucinatory light writhing up into the flyspace, the set is an adventure and a wonder,” Lloyd Rose wrote for The Washington Post in 1991. “’Miss Saigon’ is his masterpiece.”
Without a doubt, the elaborate sets accompanying the sequences drew millions of theatergoers back to “Miss Saigon.” The reenactment of the fall of Saigon in 1975 served as the apex. In this scene, Kim and Chris’s fantasies are over and their relationship has finally come to an end.
In the recent run, the back-and-forth rotation of the US Embassy set and the departure of the final helicopter carrying American soldiers provided visually arresting scenes, accompanying the drama of Kim and Chris’s separation.
Asian representation
While the acting and production design are praiseworthy, the bigger question is whether Miss Saigon’s storyline still holds up in the age of political correctness.
Nguyen, in the Times column, argued that “Miss Saigon” reeked of racism and sexism for overemphasizing the might of the Americans and downplaying the strengths of Asians, as evident by the war dragging over two decades.
“Our enjoyment of a work of art does not mean that the work cannot be racist or sexist, or that our enjoyment does not come from a deep-seated well of derogatory images of Asians and Asian women,” the award-winning author wrote. “The unsettling paradox here is that we can indeed love and desire people whom we see in completely racist and sexist ways. That is the real, unintended universal truth of ‘Miss Saigon.’”
Kim, however, is stronger than some would like to acknowledge. She had the foresight to protect Tam from the miserable life confronting more than 100,000 Amerasian children. Children of Vietnamese women and American soldiers who stayed in Vietnam “grew up under a repressive regime in a war-devastated country, often facing starvation and discrimination from Vietnamese who saw them as the enemy,” according to a 2005 book.
“Many of these targets of racial, class and political prejudice were abandoned to orphanages or the streets,” author Trin Yarborough wrote in “Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War.”
“Too often, they grew up illiterate, suffering from physical and emotional problems. Many died in epidemics that swept Vietnam. And most dreamed of unknown fathers and a golden America that might someday welcome and comfort them for all they had suffered because they were part American.”
Racism and sexism are merely byproducts of this human drama, a story that existed at the time and needed to be told. As the adage goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
To disenfranchise “Miss Saigon” is to rob the victims of the war the opportunity to have their stories told.
