THIS MISS SAIGON HAS LOST NONE OF ITS DARK POWER
Can Cameron Mackintosh’s superb new touring revival of Miss Saigon silence those who complain that – sweeping, heart-stirring score aside – it trades in offensive Asian stereotypes? Probably not. Though we’re promised a “legend reborn”, the story can’t be rejigged: set during the final days of the Vietnam War (and its aftermath), the East meets West dynamic of an American marine and a local damsel in distress remains. Yet, 50 years after the fall of Saigon, this potent and urgent production argues the case for the “problematic” blockbuster hit to the hilt.
Boublil and Schönberg’s daringly dark follow-up to Les Misérables (with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly as the template) has captivated millions worldwide since 1989. Director Jean-Pierre Van Der Spuy’s staging delivers the necessary spectacle: deploying rounds of scene-setting video, and achieving a big-budget sense of the famous helicopter airlift from the US embassy.
But equally, this doesn’t feel glossily “West End”. There’s a canny quality of roughness to the evening that lends the tartly plotted, nay contrived, action a vital semblance of the whirling chaos into which the doomed-to-be-sundered protagonists – hapless village girl Kim and disoriented GI Chris – are pitted.
The big opening number – The Heat Is On – can often fall prey to excess slickness. Not here. Seann Miley Moore’s entrancingly sleazy, sardonic and leering “Engineer” throws his Dreamland bar-brothel into hasty order to lure a gaggle of marines; characters jostle each other, chatter staggers into song. There’s nothing touristic about it: the men are muscular but battle-fatigued, the women jaded, forlorn and defiant.
And there’s nothing “sexy” about their transactions, the indictment of exploitation later climaxing in the orgiastic show-stopping mock-celebration of capitalism The American Dream, in which Moore brilliantly morphs into a preening diva in a Stars and Stripes dress.
Yes, it’s kind of corny that saving tenderness and love stirs amid the machismo and madness but it feels earned thanks to the nuance and truth of the leads. Filipino actress Julianne Pundan – just 18 – makes a sensational debut as Kim, relaying heartfelt desperation and yearning in The Movie in My Mind, and elsewhere. Jack Kane’s Chris is visibly – and audibly – disarmed by emotions that threaten his required composure. You feel for them both.
Sure, his love rival (Mikko Juan’s Thuy) is as mechanical as the choreographed Viet Cong militaristic posturing. Yet at each key turn – and especially in the case of Kim and Chris’s powerless child Tam – the show achieves critical lift-off. Even as we register the artifice of the drama we intuit the real-life separation and suffering it all denotes.
Behind their story stand countless others – traumatised and displaced, then and now, as conflict still rages round the world. Though there’s no crude hammering of its relevance here, the unmistakable impression is that we’re watching a Saigon for our times.
Manchester Palace, and touring until August 2026; miss-saigon.com
Recommended
The best plays and musicals (in London and beyond) to book now
2025-11-14T16:25:49Z