“Will you ever trust me again?” the fresh-faced G.I. asks his wife of one year, referring to the child he fathered on a Vietnamese bar girl during a brief but poignant romance just before the fall of Saigon. The wife, having known about neither the child nor the romance, is understandably distressed. But, having heard the G.I.’s explanation (“There in the shambles of a war, I found what I was looking for: Saigon was crazed, but she was real, And for one moment I could feel”), she is already relenting. “It’s all right now,” she croons. “I’m with you, we’ll get through this, we’ll pull through.” The bar girl shoots herself, but because her act perfectly mirrors the ritual suicide of Cio-Cio-San in “Madama Butterfly,” and because, in a glorious million-dollar flashback, we have seen Saigon fall and a helicopter take off inside the Broadway Theater, a good time is had by all. Moreover, since the implied question behind the G.I.’s plight—How does such a nice guy get into such a pickle?—raises the specter of allegory, Broadway audiences are able to indulge in the popular sport of national self-criticism. Nice guys, we learn, should be more careful. And so they should.
But what is the show like? Well, it’s like a lot of things—it’s like “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” and “Pacific Overtures.” It has elements of “West Side Story” and “Oliver” and “Fiddler,” and moments of striving to be “Pal Joey” and “Cabaret.” Mostly, though, “Miss Saigon” is like “Les Miserables,” which Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg also wrote. It has the same kinds of characters—a Fantine figure (the seduced-and-abandoned bar girl, Kim, played by Lea Salonga), a Thenadier figure (the parasitic Eurasian pimp known as The Engineer, played by Jonathan Pryce), a sort of proto-Cosette figure (Kim’s little boy, Tam, wordlessly played by Brian R. Baldomero)—and the same kinds of songs and numbers. An early whorehouse number offers the same plain-speaking-about-what-it’s-like to be a prostitute observations as the one at the beginning of “Les Miserables,” and it leads into a how-I-escape-from-the-harsh-realities-of-my-life song (“The Movie in My Mind”), which closely resembles “I Dreamed a Dream.” There’s a what-a-rotten-time-to-fall-in-love number, sung by the hero, Chris (Willy Falk), and his sidekick, John (Hinton Battle), which is like the one between Marius and Enjolras in “Les Mis,” and there’s a how-to-be-a-cynic song, performed by Mr. Pryce (“If You Want to Die in Bed”), which, like the corresponding song in the English version of “Les Miserables,” represents the show’s only instance of good writing.
There are the same kinds of costly and spectacular breakaway sets, designed by John Napier; the same kind of high-contrast lighting, designed by David Hersey; and the same canny staging by a Royal Shakespeare Company director—in this case, Nicholas Hytner. There are also the same hackneyed rhymes (boy/joy, kind/mind, kill/will), and a new one, of course (wife/life), as well as what sound like inversions of some of the very musical progressions that make of up the score for “Les Miserables,” so that in many places “Miss Saigon” seems not so much a rehashing of earlier material as an actual transposition. Also, the storytelling is characterized by the same dramatic vacuum. Like “Les Mis,” the show has no real characters, no ironies, no ideas. Words are of no importance whatever.
I don’t remember ever hearing anyone complain about the hypocrisy quotient in “Les Miserables” (for that you had to go to “Forbidden Broadway”). Mostly what seemed laughable to us was the dramaturgy: a character appeared, sang a generic song, then died, and we were supposed to care. One assumed that in France, where Victor Hugo’s novel is still a familiar classic, people responded to the show on the basis of knowledge and associations they brought with them to the theater. “Miss Saigon” has the same paint-by-number approach to narrative: we know nothing about any of the characters except their names. (Until the end of the first act, for instance, we never actually hear anyone talk about The Engineer engineering anything and, in fact, have to supply an explanation for his being called that.) Presumably, what is supposed to fill the dramatic void in this instance is the analogy with “Madama Butterfly.”
The transformation of the cynical “Yankee” Pinkerton into a naive well-meaning American soldier whose failure is a failure of conscience: this is supposed to be an indictment of United States military “do-gooding.” It’s a neat concept; unfortunately, it doesn’t work, partly because the show’s focus is The Engineer rather than the soldier, and partly because Mr. Pryce’s portrayal is so dissociative. It’s the kind of performance that gets called “Great” because it looks effortful and unpleasant to do, but The Engineer remains a cipher, lost in Pryce’s misguided attempt to seem American. With his weird notion of how Americans talk and his show-biz gestures and mannerisms, towering over everyone else in the cast, Mr. Pryce seems far from the sort of desperate insignificant cosmopolitan man-without-a-country that Peter Lorre, say, used to play. As for Miss Salonga, you never saw anyone less waif-like. Strong-voiced and sturdily built, she’s easy to imagine fighting her way through crowds of Christmas shoppers at Bloomingdale’s, more difficult to see as the helpless orphan of a war-torn country. Equally disconcerting is the fact that her accent, singing style, and vocal mannerisms are all firmly planted in America. Like Mr. Falk and Mr. Battle, she sings in that strained high-pitched belt, somewhere between a yelp and a whine, which comes from the forehead and seems calculated to indicate how very, very hard singing is. This is not music so much as orchestrated emotion.
In a quiet but incisive piece in the Sunday Times the novelist Robert Stone used the term “moral kitsch” to describe “Miss Saigon.” It’s a curiously apt phrase, and one that’s useful in distinguishing Boublil and Schonberg from Andrew Lloyd Webber. People tend to lump them together, because Cameron Mackintosh, who produced “Les Mis” and “Miss Saigon,” is also Lloyd Webber’s producer. But Boublil and Schonberg, though Lloyd Webber’s equals in shrewdness, are angling for a more sophisticated audience—one that prefers its entertainment laced with self-loathing. For Lloyd Webber’s audiences the mere presence of an expensive or movable gimmick—the roller skates, the falling chandelier—is enough to hang a show on. In “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon,” the gimmick is a kind of piety.
“Les Miserables” was first produced at the Palais des Sports in Paris. When the Royal Shakespeare Company adopted it as a project, they gussied it up with high-quality orchestrations, but if you listen to the French recording one of the things you can hear is the badness of the music, its vulgarity—specifically, its roots in Parisian bubble-rock. In “Miss Saigon” the sports-arena aesthetic remains more exposed. You see it in the performances of the stars. You see it in the embarrassing Ho Chi Minh ballet in Act I. You hear it in the music, which has voices pulsing with vibrato when there is nothing to emphasize or sustain. Most of all, you see it in the obscene number that begins Act II—a save-the-children choral anthem about orphaned Amerasian children of American soldiers that is illustrated by documentary film footage of real children.
How, you ask yourself, can the creators of this show justify using the real suffering of real people to enrich themselves? (It’s not as though Messers. Hytner, Mackintosh, Boublil, and Schonberg were using this footage to solicit money that they were then going to give away.) The answer, I think, lies in their approach to language and imagery: these people believe in the sound bite as literature, in images as signals—carriers of information that other agents (audiences, critics) then act upon. But this is the stuff of deconstruction. In fact, “Miss Saigon” represents a marriage between the French Academy and the British intelligentsia: it’s semiotics bailing out Marxist socialism, for if words have no importance and art has no fixed meaning, if characters and symbols exist independent of artistic intention, then there’s no such thing as hypocrisy. No wonder that, at the height of the war in the Gulf War, Variety reported that Mr. Mackintosh was considering altering Mr. Pryce’s big showstopping number about American greed and consumerism, “The American Dream,” lest the politics of the number affect box-office sales.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 29, 1991