Ronald Tiersky
June 29, 2017
Review: “Miss Saigon” on Broadway
“Miss Saigon,” at the Broadway Theater in an open-ended run, is a 2017 revival of the 1989 production first staged in London, and the first Broadway production in 1991. Claude-Michel Schoenberg and Alain Boublil, who had a historic success with Les Misérables in 1985, had a second in the original London and New York productions.
The current production is generally considered inferior to the original and it would be difficult to say otherwise. To recommend “Miss Saigon,” then or now, is controversial. I’ll say why and why today’s version is an important theater experience nonetheless.
The “Miss Saigon” story is an adaptation of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly.” The Japanese setting is updated to a Vietnam War story in the mid-1970s. A first part takes place in the last months before the final debacle: the escape of the last group of American diplomatic/military personnel in a helicopter off the roof of the Embassy, as the Vietcong/North Vietnamese took the city in 1975. (Saigon was soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the North Vietnamese Communist leader.) The tragic love story continues a few years more, in the second part, when the American soldier who had to leave “Miss Saigon” behind in the escape, learns she’s still alive, that she gave birth to his son, and returns with his American wife to find her. The end is as in “Madame Butterfly.”
The controversy about it has two aspects. In the London production and on Broadway, one of the lead roles, a Vietnamese pimp who runs a bar-club/bordel, was played by a white actor. He and another lead character, also white, wore eye prostheses and bronzing cream to make themselves look Asian. The scenario was more generally perceived as racist and sexist.
Another issue, which ought to have received more notice than it has, is the portrayal, historically accurate, of the desperation of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese to get out of the country any way possible, meaning to obtain a visa and get to the U.S. For years, many tried by any kind of boat, the “Vietnamese boat people”.
A current critic wrote, “It gets a lot easier to wrap your head around all of this for folks of color when we remember a key point: this work is not for us. It is by, for, and about white people, using people of color, tropical climes, pseudo-cultural costumes and props, violence, tragedy, and the commodification of people and cultures, to reinforce and re-inscribe a narrative about white supremacy and authority.”
Why, then, see the show? The reviews have been substantially mixed and in truth the production is a trite story, the music too loud and overly melodramatic, and the bar girl dancing vulgar to the point of disgust. Yet the cast is excellent and the leads are convincing, sincere.
I was the Vietnam War generation. I arrived at Columbia University in 1966. As a graduate student I had a deferral, which was made more definite for a reason of family history not relevant here. Thus, I wasn’t drafted and always remember the fact that others were.
In 1966-67, before the big escalation by the Johnson Administration, I was in favor of the war. A political science student on the road to a Ph.D., I believed Vietnam was an instance of containing the expansion of Communist regimes and that LBJ, McNamara and the others were acting in good faith on this basis. This, I still think, was correct, although much else was involved at the same time.
Over the years however, it became clear that Vietnam was in this global struggle nowhere near as significant an anti-Communist battle to fight as had been thought. And that our leaders failed in their narrow-mindedness and lack of historical and geopolitical understanding to see it.
As the Vietnamese Communist regime split with the Chinese Communists (not to mention that the Vietnamese and Chinese had been at odds for hundreds of years), and as the Sino-Soviet split came clear (Nixon and Kissinger went to China in 1973), it also became clear that the Vietnamese Communist revolution had been as nationalist as it was Communist.
Most of all, the numbers sank in: 58,000 Americans dead (visit the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, D.C.). This was human and moral disaster. But—and few Americans have any idea of this—one and a half-million Vietnamese dead, their country destroyed. This was, in human and moral terms, worse.
There are several scenes in “Miss Saigon” that give some small sense of what the Vietnam War was like on the ground for the Vietnamese and for the Americans. American soldiers are depicted drugged and running wild in the bars, fighting with each other about how they were behaving in their positions of power with Vietnamese civilians, including the bar girls. Sometimes the Americans aimed guns at each other, including their friends. Nevertheless, the camaraderie of combat soldiers even in the worst of times. The camaraderie of the bar girls even in such horrible conditions. The Vietnamese pimp who will make money wherever he can, because ‘human beings are the same everywhere’. Even this low-life war profiteer is trying desperately to get a visa for the States to realize his “American Dream.”
The love story of an American soldier and a 17 year-old Vietnamese peasant girl forced into the bar/prostitution trade is another aspect. This is the “Madame Butterfly” tragedy that is the center of this production. In fact, there were hundreds of cases of American soldiers and Vietnamese women in this war, as there were thousands in World War II, and as there are in every war.
The final scene in the American escape is the theatrically famous arrival of a helicopter above the stage, landing on the roof of the American Embassy. That desperate moment—it really happened—is etched into the memory of every American alive that day in 1975. The helicopter taking the last Americans out of Saigon, a few trying to get Vietnamese out with them. (The half-crazed American soldier can’t get Miss Saigon out with him.)
The helicopter takes off, leaving crowds of Vietnamese shut outside the Embassy gates, shrieking and agonized at what they know is coming.
In the New York Times, (March 23, 2017), its senior theater critic Ben Brantley mocks the artificiality of the helicopter-as-prop. “Miss Saigon is destined to be known forever as ‘the musical with the helicopter’”. The headline writer titled the review, “Return of the Little Copter that wowed in ‘Miss Saigon’”.
Now Brantley is a theater critic talking about theater. His disdain for the helicopter mock-up is his affair.
But his review has nothing to say about the Vietnam War as depicted in the show. It should have.