untitled f*ck miss s**gon play

Miss Saigon was one of the big musicals that opened in the 80s and 90s. Based on Puccini’s Madame Butterly  and created the writers of Les Misérables plus an American lyricist—all men—it starred Lea Salonga as Kim and Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer—the man who runs the club where the girls go to meet GIs during the closing days of the Vietnam War in 1975. Kim meets Chris, whose friend is called John because it rhymes with Saigon, and Chris and Kim fall in love and she gets pregnant while he goes back to America and restarts his life, including getting married.

The show was known at the time for the big helicopter which played a role in the fall of Saigon theme, and the fact that white Jonathan Pryce wore eye makeup to make him look “more Asiatic”.

And I thought it was new and brash and brilliant. I bought the cassette, and I bought the book about it (cowritten by Mark Steyn—and look what happened to him?) And there are good things about it: I guess the main one being the discovery of Lea Salonga, who’s a legitimately excellent musical theatre performer with many credits. The Broadway reception was the first indication I had about the dodgy racial politics. 

I hate saying “it was a different time”, I prefer “I bought the cassette” obviously. 

In this play, which seems to take aim directly at the mega-musical, author Kimber Lee creates a character, Kim, who initially is stuck in the plot of Madame Butterfly. She is always the demure ‘Oriental’ woman and there’s always a chisel-jawed American hero. Kim’s counterparts are always downtrodden and want to get out and go to America where they will have better rights and more opportunity. There’s always a baby and the baby is always given to the Americans, and Kim ends up  killing herself. (Spoilers for Miss Saigon obviously!) Mei Mac plays Kim and it needs to be understood that she plays the role wonderfully: she gets the stereotypical depiction right and does excellent work with the rest…

And what is the rest? Well, after Butterfly, Kim goes through the same Groundhog Day type scenario in South Pacific and then MASH before finally ending up in 1975… but she continues through a weirdly changed tone into modern day America and a long sequence which would be a second act if the show had an interval. In this sequence her ever-present mother figure, who delivers a long speech about how it was seeing people who looked like her on screen when she went to see World of Susie Wong. But this joy in familiarity has the flip side of the art itself not being especially representative. Then there’s an awkward multi-cultural dinner scene where Kim is an outsider inside, because everyone thinks she’s neurotic or drunk but she is just tired of cultural stereotyping because she has lived through all those shows and is now living in the inevitable result of being in America, having the success and the family—and yet not being content.

The style is distinctly comedy. A narrator translates the American who speaks in Anglo-Asian cliché; she also commentates the first section of the play. In the dinner scene she becomes a guest, and an important part of what was so good is somehow lost. World of Suzy Wong may be fun and not to be taken seriously, and William Holden was indeed very handsome. South Pacific is certainly dated… and there are probably not enough Asians involved in the cultures of the West. Same with Africa and South America I suspect. Miss Saigon has been re-imagined, apparently, with the Engineer a woman now and some other changes. I wouldn’t go and see it again, but Cameron Mackintosh—quoted in the play script—points at the simplicity of the love story. And this is fine but some of the lyrics are flowery and excessively fantastical which seems weird set against not only our reality, but the grittiness and heft of the original production. Maybe they couldn’t find an actor of Pryce’s stature to headline a show, but then maybe art shouldn’t be about the need of people queuing around the block to see the latest from the Les Miz guys.

Is it anyone’s fault that they peddled the cliché that everyone in America somehow wants to go there when the trouble starts? This is a play about the frustration of not being able to break away from commercial art resorting to crude generalisation. It’s fine and funny, but I feel like I keep hearing about this sort of thing and I’m powerless to make a difference.