America can still conquer the world via power of musical
CAMERON Mackintosh’s touring production of ‘Miss Saigon’ is flying into Dublin for an extensive run.
The show is like an armed nuclear warhead of Americana and flattens everything within its blast radius. The US should stand down its military. It is easily conquering the world via the Broadway-style musical.
‘Miss Saigon’ was first produced in London’s West End in 1989, created by the French-Tunisian musical theatre duo, writer Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg.
The story is of an innocent country girl Kim, who fetches up in Saigon after her village has been attacked and her parents burned alive. She works as a bar girl in a brothel, stuffed with sexy dancers and run by the especially seedy Engineer.
Kim falls in love with American serviceman Chris and he intends to take her home, but they get separated when the Americans leave Saigon. It is a version of Puccini’s 1904 Madame Butterfly, where the male hero is not quite up to being truly heroic.
Act Two opens with a sweet ballad, ‘Bui Doi’, delivered by all male voices. It is about the children fathered by American GIs and left behind in Vietnam: the American conscience gets wrung out into the auditorium.
Just as it is all getting a bit schmaltzy, the Engineer starts a brothel in Bangkok and so more sexy dancers.
The show cleverly combines high romanticism with showbiz razzmatazz.
The Engineer has a stirring fantasy number about the American Dream. He’s such a sleaze-ball, it feels originally like a satirical send-up of the concept. But half-way through the number twists on its axis and launches into a sincere celebration of the US. Audiences love to love America.
The international cast is entirely first-rate. The dance routines are top-notch. Staging is inventive, with the nightmare sequence of the American army leaving Saigon a pure highlight: the helicopter takes off in spectacular fashion.
At its core, this is a moral fable about Americans trying to put things right when they get them wrong. But the story of the American dream as an answer to the world’s problems has begun to feel shaky in 2017. America has turned in on itself; musical theatre has yet to get the memo. It probably never will.