I went to see ‘Miss Saigon,’ not ‘The Engineer’
THE acclaimed “Miss Saigon” is, thanks to Lea Salonga’s legendary owning of the titular role, the one example of the musical genre that is probably the most familiar to Filipinos, although the vast majority likely only know it by name and association with their celebrated compatriot. That mildly benign jingoism adds another interesting layer to what is already a profoundly meaningful tragedy; more than most other works, the way it is played in different places is a key part of whether or not it conveys its underlying message and how that message may be understood.
That is a difficult challenge to accomplish successfully, as the Cameron Mackintosh production of “Miss Saigon,” playing now at the Theatre at Solaire, demonstrated in its performance this past Saturday night.
For the benefit of those whose knowledge of the show is limited to “Lea Salonga was in it” and “it has something to do with Vietnam,” “Miss Saigon,” which premiered in 1989, is loosely patterned on the well-known 1904 opera “Madame Butterfly” by Giacomo Puccini, and is set at the very end of the Vietnam War. It tells the story of Kim, a young Vietnamese country girl who has fled her destroyed village and an arranged marriage to her cousin, a communist rebel she does not love, and is forced by poverty into prostitution under the management of a pimp called “The Engineer” in Saigon. She meets and falls in love with Chris, a US Marine sergeant, who promises to take her home with him, but in the chaos of the fall of Saigon, the two are separated, and Chris is forced to abandon her.
Kim bears a son and, for three years, holds out hope that Chris will one day return for her, vowing that her son will someday meet his father and be given a better life in America. The Engineer, seeing an opportunity to also escape Vietnam and the communist regime that has ruined his sleazy line of work, helps Kim and her son to escape to Bangkok, where she is located by John, Chris’ wartime comrade who now works to reunite American servicemen with the Vietnamese children they left behind.
Chris, however, has moved on in life and is married, but he and his wife Ellen, wanting to do the right thing, travel to Bangkok to see how they may help Kim and her son. Kim is shattered by the discovery that her love is gone but swears she will keep her promise to her son and begs Ellen to take him to America. Ellen, anguished by the tragic situation confronting her, refuses to separate mother and child, so Kim forces the issue by committing suicide.
When it premiered, “Miss Saigon” was both hailed and criticized for the manner in which it tackled a number of grim themes: the chaos and lawlessness caused by the war, American shame and guilt for abandoning the Vietnamese, Vietnamese social taboos, the plight of refugees, and above all, the extremely sensitive subject — in both America and Vietnam, but for very different reasons — of the tens of thousands of children of Vietnamese women and American soldiers, shunned in the land of their birth and forgotten in the land of their fathers. Interestingly, “Miss Saigon” created a new term for them: bui doi, which in Vietnamese literally means “vagrant” or “street (i.e., homeless) person,” but since the musical appeared, it has been applied to the children prior to 1989, they were almost always referred to as “Amerasians.”
Again, in case it’s not clear, this story is in no sense a comedy, although as originally written, the character of The Engineer — a pimp, a drug dealer, petty thief and all-around hustler, and as such a symbol of what Vietnamese society had become when it was torn apart by war — offers a few moments of comic relief. Not to make light of the overall story but rather to lighten the mood at times when the tension of tragedy becomes unbearable.
In the current production, however, The Engineer inexplicably becomes the star of the show, which in many respects sidelines the central role of Kim. That’s not just an interpretation, either; it is The Engineer, played by Fil-Australian Seann Miley Moore, who does a fantastic job with the role he was given and who arrives last for the curtain call. Another interesting choice is that The Engineer in this production is flamboyantly gay, something that seems to have been a deliberate interpretation for a Filipino audience. The effect is that it softens the character to some extent. In reality, he is a despicable, manipulative person utterly without compassion or morals, but when he’s prancing around in Vice Ganda-esque, clownlike fashion, he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy and is maybe a bit of a victim in this whole grotesque tragedy as well.
An interesting choice, but a jarring one. Besides downplaying The Engineer’s role in Kim’s misery, it diminishes the important cultural constraints — otherwise symbolized by her erstwhile native husband, Thuy, whose role is also