Miss Saigon

The Sunday Age

Sunday April 8, 2007

Bill Perrett

Miss Saigon. To July 15. Her Majesty's Theatre, 199-225 Exhibition Street, city. Tel: 1300 795 012. $102/$57

4/5

You'll get precisely the kind of handsome, smooth-as-silk, high-energy show you'd expect from the creative and material resources that have clearly gone into Cameron Mackintosh's new production of Miss Saigon. The dancing, singing, music, sets, costumes, the sheer visual impact are all the product of high professionalism. The emotional impact is skilfully calculated and clearly effective; on opening night, two audience members nearby were sobbing uncontrollably during the last scenes.

Miss Saigon has its roots in the Madame Butterfly story, reset in Saigon at the end of the end of the Vietnam war. Ingenue Kim (Laurie Cadevida) finds herself in the Dreamland bar just as everything's coming unglued for the US, and falls in love with nice-guy GI Chris (David Harris). The intensity doesn't drop much from there, relieved only by the machinations of the devious Engineer (Leo Tavarro Valdez), owner of the bar, and a stunning ensemble dance number or two; one memorable example is performed by victorious communists dressed as Uncle Sams with deaths heads, under a giant Ho Chi Minh mask.

This production doesn't have the famous replica helicopter in the fall of Saigon scene, but the projected version is still pretty effective. A big, spectacular production that achieves precisely what it sets out to do.