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Miss Saigon Comes to America
| Article
# : |
18511 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
1,758 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
The first sounds we hear in Miss Saigon are those of helicopter blades slicing the air like some cruel Cuisinart. The sound of copters is the strong aural identification we have with the Vietnam War. (Copter chopping is also the first sound we hear in what is, to my mind, the one undisputed masterpiece of that war, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse, Now.) If sound can be said to have an irony in it, those chopping blades swiping thin air do. It is the sound, figuratively, of destruction taking place in a vacuum which in turn, metaphorically, mirrors the Vietnam War itself--a war in which atrocities occurred for no discernible reason, a prolonged and senseless exercise in military maneuvering.
Thus, Miss Saigon, a pop opera of the war, opens with what is almost a subliminal reminder of senselessness. It immediately reopens wounds from the war that have not properly healed or else dredges emotions that have been laid to rest during the last decade. Already the musical, by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, the team responsible for the phenomenally successful Les Miserables, has manipulated its audience. There's also some new lyrical input from lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr., who seems to have been hired to give it some Yankee realism. Miss Saigon never works up to a high note; it cunningly begins on one.
Four handkerchief
On the face of it Miss Saigon is a clever reworking of David Belasco's four-handkerchief warhorse, Madame Butterfly, which has in turn served to inspire artists as disparate as Puccini (Madame Butterfly) and David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly). An American soldier, Chris (Simon Bowman, in the original London production), falls in love with an innocent Vietnamese girl, Kim (Lea Salonga), as he is about to leave Vietnam. They are separated from each other during the fall of Saigon. Kim has Chris' child. Three years later Chris and his wife, Ellen (Claire Moore), come to Bangkok, where Kim now lives with the child. But there is to be no reconciliation; all is too late; tragedy ensues.
As a serious piece of art Miss Saigon bears little discussion. It is a big, colorful, high-strung piece of entertainment and real proof, if any further were needed, of the potency of cheap music. But it is a pop phenomenon with resonance--a reminder that sentimentality can, if packaged with enough brilliance, be a form of genius in itself. (We think fondly, for example, of what Belasco did in the theater at the turn of the century; and though we'd be hard pressed to call Belasco an artist, we have no problem calling him a
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