‘Miss Saigon’ story
By Ruth Bingham
unfolds seamlessly
Special to the Star-BulletinCROSS-CULTURAL love and conflict are surely one of this century's most enduring themes, from Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" in 1904, right through "South Pacific," "West Side Story" and "Pacific Overtures" to name only the best known examples, to the current "Miss Saigon."
After two previews, Alain Boublil's and Claude-Michel Schoenberg's long-awaited "Miss Saigon" finally opened to full houses.
Anticipation ran high, not so much for the oft-told story but for its production. Were the famous helicopter and Cadillac as sensational as predicted? Yes. Were they dramatically powerful? Yes. The surprise was that the overall production was even more impressive.
Lighting, sets, costumes, staging, choreography were all superb Saturday, woven into a seamless dramatic fabric. "Miss Saigon's" story of the meeting of sun (American marine Chris) and moon (Kim, a 17-year-old Vietnamese girl) opens with a full sun rising out of the blood-red glow of dawn on Saigon's silvery-pale city scape imprinted on bamboo screens.
Victimized and vulnerable by war, Chris falls into and Kim latches onto a sweet love, made all the more exigent by its brutal surroundings. They sing of the last night of the world of their world, of American occupation and their love is the lonely melancholy "of a solo saxophone."
MISS SAIGON
On stage: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays, and 2 p.m. weekend matinees, through Nov. 14.
When Communists take Saigon, the free-flowing staging of the bars' vulgar eroticism shifts abruptly to soldiers' rigid choreography, with stark flags, intimidating masks and aggressive acrobats grimly celebrating the new regime. The transformation is stunning.
Left alone, Kim struggles to keep alive herself and her 3-year-old son Tam, played by Cherish Corpuz. Kim clings desperately to the belief that Chris will return to save them, and in one of the drama's most powerful scenes, even kills to protect her son. Chris, meanwhile, sleeps fitfully back in the United States with his new American wife.
Magical touches abound as the story winds to its inevitable close. Bar girls sing on a darkened stage, their isolated faces spotlighted like lost and lonely moons. Time after time, pieces of sets assemble for a scene, then break apart as the world was breaking apart to dissolve into the next scene. In a scene straight from "Oliver!," the Fagin-esque Engineer digs through his hoarded treasures, pulling out his pimp's coat, the symbol of his hoarded former self. Refugees trudge off an empty stage into the mists of an uncertain future. The list of wonderful moments is gratifyingly long.
"Miss Saigon" is, above all, a musical work, the only difference between it and opera being its Broadway vocal style, with its concomitant timbral shifts in register.
Although the setting is Vietnam, the music states clearly that the story is by and for Westerners: the genre is unequivocally Broadway, flavored by ambiguously "Eastern" winds and percussion. Conductor Charles duChateau delivered a well paced, tightly controlled performance.Lead performer Joseph Anthony Foronda, the amoral Engineer, offered the only comic, and therefore most entertaining, character. Delicious in his depravity, Foronda oiled his greedy way through the plot, pimping himself even more than his girls. Despite a (hopefully temporarily) hoarse voice, Foronda raked in applause.
Mika Nishida (Kim) and Greg Stone (Chris) suited their roles perfectly. Nishida is petite, a fine actress with an open, childlike idealism crucial for Kim, and has a strong, clear voice in her belt range. Her music contains the drama's memorable melodies ("Last Night of the World," "I Still Believe," "You Will Not Touch Him," "I'd Give My Life for You," "Sun and Moon") and her voice must match the clarity of the shakuhachi, her character's signature.
Stone portrayed the conflicted Chris skillfully and managed the demanding singing role, which ranged from his lowest notes up into his falsetto.
In secondary roles were Eugene Barry-Hill (John, Chris's marine buddy), local performer Johnny Fernandez (Thuy, Kim's cousin and betrothed), and Jacquelyn Piro (Ellen, Chris's second wife). All three were excellent, believable actors with good voices.
Fernandez, portraying a hateful character, was outstanding even among an outstanding cast. (No, I'm not prejudiced toward him because he's local.)
Piro had the dubious honor of playing an unsympathetic character in the drama's second weak point. Boublil and Schoenberg attempted to give the role more depth than previous versions: they at least gave her a song. Unfortunately, the character remains flat. Ellen doesn't "belong." Her whiteness amplified by white stockings and shoes, she was the quintessential military wife.
Chris' and Ellen's "solution" to remain in Bangkok and support Kim and Tam happens so quickly and with so little dramatic resolution that it is ludicrous.
"Miss Saigon" strikes a perfect balance between the sentimentalism that allows us to care about its characters and a modern irony that pervades all levels, from its title through American dreams to Kim's final line, "How in one night have we come so far?"
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