Romance in wartime is a familiar topic of musicals, but few are as emotionally wrenching or politically charged as Miss Saigon.
Controversial when it first arrived on Broadway in 1991 – more for its casting choices than its themes – the show has gotten beyond that cultural authenticity issue and beyond a fixation with its onstage helicopter to demonstrate its lasting dramatic assets and theatrical power.
Now playing at the Kravis Center through Sunday, this national tour based on the Broadway revival from two years ago takes us back to the Vietnam War days, a time of turbulence and national division. Southeast Asia is where writers Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg have re-invented Puccini’s Madama Butterfly into a tragic love story between Chris, an American soldier, and Kim, a delicate, initially innocent Vietnamese bar girl.
What begins as a sexual encounter between them becomes a deeper emotional attachment several love songs later, and Chris becomes committed to bringing Kim back to the States with him. But in the chaos of the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in 1975 – cue the helicopter – their planned life together is thwarted. And years later, Chris learns that Kim has given birth to a son, his son. Although now-married Chris is determined to aid Kim and the boy, you do not need to be familiar with the original opera to sense that this will not end well.
The transposition of the story to Vietnam is inspired enough, but the adaptors have an even more clever invention – a sleazy Eurasian pimp and profiteer known as The Engineer, part Cabaret’s Emcee and part Fagan from Oliver!, a character obsessed with relocating to America for all the wrong reasons. As played by chubby Red Concepcion with amorality oozing from every pore, his bravura performance is capped by the 11 o’clock number, “The American Dream,” which aims to make the audience uncomfortable and succeeds.
In the title role – a reference to a faux-beauty contest in a Saigon bar – diminutive Emily Bautista has a big, expressive singing voice, as does Anthony Festa as embassy driver Chris. Unfortunately, their diction leaves a lot to be desired, notably on their duets. Perhaps the problem is in the writing, but as I noted the previous time the show played the Kravis Center, it cries out for supertitles to make the lyrics intelligible.
Laurence Connor, producer Cameron Mackintosh’s go-to director for the revivals of his musicals originally imported in the ’80s and ’90s, keeps the show moving with a cinematic sweep. He is aided largely by the production design of Totie Driver and Matt Kinley, a seamy depiction of Southeast Asia, artfully and starkly lighted by Bruno Poet. The musical’s original choreographer, Bob Avian, gets the assignment again and recreates his memorable dragon and ribbon dance, a transition to the new era of oppression in Ho Chi Minh City.
While Miss Saigon is clearly a musical, it is sung-through like an opera and its heightened emotions are also operatic. Boublil and Schönberg has a tough act to follow after their triumph with Les Misérables, but the show at the Kravis makes a compelling case for why this work will be will us for a long time to come.
MISS SAIGON, Kravis Center, 801 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday. $48-$113. Call 561-832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.