Musical Is A Hit And Miss Affair

Newcastle Herald

Wednesday September 26, 2007

Ken Longworth

REVIEW

MISS SAIGON

Presented by: Cameron Mackintosh, Michael Coppel, Louise Withers, Linda Bewick

Venue: Lyric Theatre, Sydney (1300 796 330)

Season: To December 22

LIKE most of the big musicals of its day, the first Australian production of Miss Saigon 12 years ago was a carbon copy in look and staging of the London and New York productions.

The emphasis was on spectacle and the thing that most people remember about the show was a noisy helicopter descending to rescue American soldiers as the North Vietnamese took over Saigon in 1975.

This home-grown production has more inventive staging, with the helicopter rescue much less obtrusive but just as dramatic through the use of computer-generated imagery.

Director Laurence Connor and the British and Australian team of designers have come up with a show that is one of the best-looking I have seen; and it's pleasing that producer Cameron Mackintosh is looking at using this production as the template for others around the world.

But the quality of the staging makes the weakness of the material even more evident.

Miss Saigon is based on the same story as the opera Madame Butterfly, with the action transposed to the last weeks of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the three years following.

The innocent oriental woman here is a refugee Vietnamese country girl, Kim, who is literally pulled off a street in Saigon to work as a bar girl in a seedy nightspot frequented by American soldiers. And the American who loves her and leaves her is Chris, one of those soldiers, who is separated from Kim in the chaos surrounding the fall of Saigon.

The atmosphere of the bar, Dreamland, and of an equally seedy nightspot in Bangkok where Kim is employed after escaping from Vietnam, is well established, as are the frantic departure of the Americans and the triumphal ceremonies of the North Vietnamese.

But the songs, from the French team who wrote Les Miserables (composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Alain Boubil, with American Richard Maltby jnr working on the English-language version) are even more repetitive than those of Les Miz.

Sun and Moon, a love song first delivered with a poignant beauty by David Harris's Chris and Laurie Cadevida's Kim, has lost its charm by the time it is reprised late in the show because the tune has been endlessly recycled.

And the big show stopper, The American Dream, sung by Leo Tavarro Valdez's manipulative entrepreneur The Engineer, needs to be earlier in the work to give it more oomph.

One of the pleasures of this Miss Saigon, from a Hunter viewpoint, is to see Maitland's David Harris in his first major lead.

The loud applause and cheers he received at the end from the Sydney audience showed the strength of his performance.

Ken Longworth