Since its premiere at the Theatre Royal in London in 1989, “Miss Saigon” has become a legendary musical shown in theaters all over the globe to high acclaim.
The impossible love story of a young Vietnamese woman, Kim, and an American G.I., Chris, has captivated the hearts of audiences for decades. The show has won numerous awards, including three Tonys, and had the 13th-longest-run in Broadway history.
With much anticipation, producer Cameron Mackintosh and creators Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil have revived the musical and are embarking on a national tour, starting at the Providence Performing Arts Center on Friday.
“I’ve always found Providence to have the space for us to take time to get a show up properly, which you don’t always get in other markets,” Mackintosh said about the choice of PPAC for the show’s premiere.
“The Providence Performing Arts Center was actually built for ‘Miss Saigon,’ as it was built for ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ Those were the two shows of mine … 25 years ago, when the theater was thinking of expanding the cinema stage into a full Broadway stage,” he said. “I feel very proud to be a catalyst in this city and how it has thrived on the back of what was a gamble for them. For the big shows, there’s a terrific local audience.”
Highlighting the cast is Emily Bautista playing Kim, Anthony Festa in the role of Chris and Red Concepcion playing The Engineer.
“It was hard; it took over a year,” Mackintosh says of finding the right cast for this run. “One of the problems with casting ‘Miss Saigon’ in America is that there are second and third generations of Asians that have completely assimilated themselves into American culture.
“That doesn’t completely translate to the central concept of ‘Miss Saigon’ due to the mistakes and the horrors happening. So in casting, we have to find people who are genuinely Asian, so it’s a different culture. That’s much harder to find because people are so assimilated to the American way of life.”
Mackintosh continued, “We’re often finding, as we did with our original star, Eva Noblezada, who we had in London after finding her in a high school in America, that Filipino culture fits in well with casting. If it weren’t for them, then ‘Miss Saigon’ would have never had the run it did.
“There’s something about their background, that they were a Spanish colony and then an American colony, and yet they’re still very much an Asian country.
“Take it to this material, and bring both the technical ability to deliver a big score like this one to a Western musical, while at the same time they understand the story from the nature of their culture.”
Sometimes a great musical or a play can reflect the times of today, no matter if it was written 30 years ago. Both Schönberg and Boublil believe that ‘Miss Saigon’ still has cultural significance and relates to the current political and social climate.
“The story of ‘Miss Saigon’ is timeless,” Schönberg said. “It’s about the sacrifice of the mother for her child. This has been existing for thousands of years and it will continue to exist for thousands of years.
“That’s basically the story we wanted to have, while at the same time it’s the story of two people from totally different cultures falling in love. Using the background of the war in Vietnam in 1975, and people leaving the dictatorship and an oppressive regime, is more relevant than ever. It’s more relevant than it was even 10 years ago.”
Schönberg continued, “When we wrote it, it was the very end of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union and the world was split in two parts. Today, you have so many places in the world where similar things are happening, like in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, all of Africa and Venezuela, for example.
“I think that everybody understands that when you are leaving a country where you don’t know if you’re going to eat, you want freedom and you want to survive. We have the American dream, but to others it can be the European dream or the British dream or the Colombian dream for the people living in Venezuela.”
Boublil added, “If you take this story from the prospect of The Engineer, he’s someone who organizes things to his advantage because he believes more in his version of the American dream than anyone else.
“It’s a kind of crooked version of it, and today there are ‘engineers’ everywhere trying to help people all over the world go from one country to another one which is supposedly a happier place.
“I see these ‘engineers’ everywhere on television. They are these people who think they can take advantage of a difficult situation.
“The character in the show has all these faults because he’s a pervert, and at the same time he has the purity of his beliefs. What he believes in is that having more money or having more of everything makes you a better man. He can’t be more perverted, but at the same time, I see many people like that on television today.”
According to a report on Providence Journal