TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040891/0408410.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.7 KB | 212 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 72

Last Exit to the Land of Hope


A $10 million Broadway musical flaunts spectacle but plays to
the heart

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/
New York


    On the night that Les Miserables opened in London in
October 1985, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel
Schonberg asked their producer, Cameron Mackintosh, if they now
had an assured career in the theater. When he said yes, the two
French creators told the impresario they had a new project: they
wanted to update the Madama Butterfly story. This time their
inspiration was not a 1,000-page Victor Hugo novel but a single
news photograph of a Vietnamese mother and daughter parting at
an airport. The mother had raised her child with one goal: to
locate the girl's father, an American soldier who had returned
to the U.S., then send the child off to join him in a life of
opportunity in a land the mother would never see. The musical
would tell of such a mother, begin in the waning days of the
U.S. presence in Vietnam and be called Miss Saigon.

    The idea evolved into the most anticipated show in U.S.
stage history. Its first phase, a two-record "concept album,"
turned out to be unreleasable because it unwisely sounded just
like Les Miz and had to be junked at a cost of $500,000. But
the show was radically revamped and opened on stage in London,
where it remains the town's hottest ticket. On its way to
Broadway, it ran afoul of the performers' union, Actors' Equity,
and assorted ethnic lobbying groups. Charges that Mackintosh had
not sought out enough Asian Americans escalated into a probe of
racial hiring practices on all his shows; at one point he
canceled the Broadway engagement in disgust and, he now reveals,
reverted Miss Saigon's rights to its authors. The battles ended,
as everyone always predicted, with Broadway making way for a
much needed hit.

    The first really healthy musical of the 11-month-old
season, Miss Saigon will open next week already holding cash and
commitments for a record $36 million in tickets -- about double
the tally of the former champion, The Phantom of the Opera. It
seems set to pay off its production cost of $10 million, also
a record, by the turn of the year. In an era when many musicals
run a year or two without repaying a cent of their investment,
Mackintosh aims to show a profit after 36 weeks, a timetable he
accomplished with Miss Saigon in London. Such claims of
financial wizardry might be suspect from almost anyone else but
this disarmingly frank and casual ex-stagehand. A keen intellect
with a common touch, he presented four of the foremost
international hits of the '80s, Cats, Phantom, Les Miz and
Little Shop of Horrors, and is regarded as the world's nonpareil
producer.

    Even for Mackintosh, mounting a musical about Vietnam that
recalls both the agony of defeat and the shame of abandonment
-- and that ends in thwarted love and suicide -- seemed a risky
business. Suppressing an impulse to premiere the show directly
on Broadway, something he had never done, Mackintosh tried Miss
Saigon in the West End, where theatergoing is a steadier habit
and Vietnam guilt is not a local concern. He then relied on word
of mouth among U.S. tourists to build up a buzz. By now it is
a crescendo, enough to let him catapult Broadway's top
single-show price to $100, a level previously limited to
scalpers, for each of 250 front mezzanine seats, and to $60 for
nearly all the rest.

    For that sum, theatergoers get the patented
English-musical mix of romance and melodrama, soliloquy and
strife, all bound up in an unsurpassed spectacle. Seen through
the eyes of two Vietnamese characters -- a pimp and hustler of
irredeemable cynicism called the Engineer (Jonathan Pryce) and
a woman of unquenchable faith and optimism called Kim (Lea
Salonga) -- the narrative fuses a crude soap-opera plot with
subtle satire of relations between capitalism and the Third
World. Big in cast (45), emotion and physical sweep, the story
ranges from the neon vice bars of Saigon and Bangkok to the
red-bannered propaganda parades and squalid re-education camps
of the Hanoi regime. It embraces chaste Asian weddings and bawdy
Yankee beauty contests, a crooning anthem to a glistening
American automobile and an austere hymn to a mammoth statue of
Ho Chi Minh.

    In the show's climactic flashback and visual signature,
audiences relive a humiliating moment from the nightly newscasts
of April 1975: the last U.S. helicopter to leave hovers just
above the embassy in Saigon, its rotors whirring and its engine
aroar, while behind a barred gate a throng of dependents,
informers, helpers and hangers-on howl to be rescued. Among them
is the title character, Kim, a peasant virgin turned bar girl
turned soldier's wife-to-be, forlornly waving the now useless
paper that says she is entitled to join the soldier far away.
That moment shapes Kim's life and drives the story toward its
tragic reunion. When at last she sees the father of her toddler
son, he is married to another woman. In a desperate moment, Kim
does the only thing she can think of to force the father to
take his son to the U.S. With her suicide, a story that has
been passionate and thrilling turns doom struck, and the hope
for which she gives up everything is deliberately left hanging.
As she dies, the person holding and comforting the child is not
the father nor his new wife nor an American friend on the scene
but the Engineer, who has viewed the boy chiefly as a human
passport to the paradise of American prosperity. Says
Mackintosh: "The audience has to leave not knowing what will
happen to the child. That is the truth of the world we live in."

    Dramatically, Kim's lover Chris, his wife Ellen and his
friend John are much less important than the Vietnamese, and the
action is largely confined to Asia. The play's real subject is
what "they" -- Third World people, Asian people -- think of the
basically Western "us" that is presupposed to be the audience.
To make Kim and the Engineer vivid when they reveal almost
nothing of themselves except their fantasies of these distant
others requires skillful acting and incandescent star quality.
The London production had both, and Mackintosh fought fiercely
to bring its two leads -- each of whom won the Olivier Award,
London's equivalent of the Tony -- to Broadway. Actors' Equity
objected to Salonga because she was not a citizen (she is a
Filipino), but eventually accepted her as providing "unique
services." Only 17 when she won the role, at 20 she sings with
nonstop power and precision and acts with steamroller emotional
clarity. Theater insiders compare her to Ethel Merman. Like
Merman, she makes a role seem one she was born to play.

    Pryce too had troubles with Equity, although it had
previously certified his right to appear as an international
star (he won a Tony award in 1977 for his Broadway debut in
Comedians). Its members objected because he was a white man
playing a rare juicy Asian role (the character is actually of
mixed Eurasian ancestry) and because he wore special makeup to
help. Pryce, a liberal, said he was sympathetic but stubbornly
held out to repeat the role, in part because it had been such
a stretch to sing musical-comedy numbers after years as one of
the West End's foremost interpreters of classics, especially
Chekhov. As the Engineer he kowtows and skulks, sneers and
connives, yet never lapses into the stereotype of the wily
Oriental. This is a man driven to sleaziness by circumstance,
a man born to command business but victimized by his race,
nationality, time and place. Far from a racist act, Pryce's
performance is a deep draft of humanity -- while missing none
of the almost Dickensian slime.

    Having chosen the ambiance of Vietnam in which to portray
a woman seduced and abandoned (albeit more honorably than in
Puccini's operatic version of the story), Mackintosh and his
colleagues voice great ambivalence about how significant the
setting is. Because the performers are so young -- Salonga was
just four when Saigon fell, and few of the youths playing
soldiers were even in their teens -- the cast was instructed
through film and speakers about the mood of those times. But the
creators emphasize to all who will listen that Miss Saigon is
not about politics. Their edgy manner and the almost
rehearsed-sounding consistency of their rhetoric suggest a fear
that political seriousness might turn audiences off -- and that
an unflinching look at bad memories from Vietnam may be wildly
inappropriate just after the buoying triumph of the gulf war.

    Some political content is unavoidable. The second act
opens with a short documentary, accompanied by a powerful song,
about the abundance of children like Kim's -- approximately
20,000 left in Vietnam by American G.I.s. Of these, about 11,000
have immigrated to the U.S. and several thousand others are on
the way via camps in the Philippines. Scorned for their
mixed-breed otherness and politically suspect American ancestry,
these "bui doi" (dust of life) have often been abandoned by
their mother, tormented into quitting school and hounded from
the work force. But life is not always much better in the U.S.
When the fathers can be found, only about 2% show any interest,
and the new arrivals are often overwhelmed by poverty and
culture shock.

    But Mackintosh and his colleagues soft-pedal relevance and
liken the show to West Side Story, another classic of thwarted
love retold in a modern setting. Says director Nicholas Hytner:
"This piece has no political sophistication -- operas never do.
Music plays to the heart. It asks an audience to understand that
every massive world event has an effect on small people."
Mackintosh concedes that some 10 minutes have been cut from the
London version but rejects claims that the show has been muted
politically. "Half of that," he says, "was scene-change music
that was no longer needed because this stage is smaller." But
the accusatory Bui Doi number has been toned down, and restaging
has softened the starkness of Kim's suicide, placing her child
in another room.

    Rehearsals for Broadway started Jan. 28, 12 days after the
gulf fighting broke out. "We gave that a lot of thought," says
co-lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. "If it turns out the timing is
not great, we're just going to take our lumps. We decided the
only thing that could hurt us would be if we backed off from the
show." All in all, they haven't. Miss Saigon is not a
documentary, not journalism. But it remains stunningly relevant
by the standards of Broadway, and triumphantly Broadway in
meeting the standards of relevance.