A darker, angrier Miss Saigon has successfully moved with the times
The story of an American soldier and a Vietnamese bar girl is at the heart of Miss Saigon but the amoral Engineer steals the show.
The older it gets the darker and angrier it gets. Miss Saigon has moved with the times. No doubt it’s not enough for those who have always found the musical problematic but there has been a shift.
“Tastes like white privilege,” says The Engineer (Seann Miley Moore), lasciviously running their tongue along the shiny duco of an ostentatious car. I’m not sure I’ve heard that line before in this musical, but it’s a zinger.
Miss Saigon remains a madly entertaining spectacle and under the auspices of Opera Australia there’s an orchestra of 25, a lavish number these days. It’s an abundance now accompanied by a sharper sense of real tragedy.
This revised staging dates from 2014 so the American withdrawal from Kabul was well into the future but images of anguished people on the wrong side of the fence in 2021 could easily have come from Saigon in 1975.
A good deal of the added astringency is concentrated in the central figure of The Engineer, played by Moore as someone tap-dancing on a high wire with no safety net other than their formidable wits.
The Engineer survives by selling young women to US soldiers during the Vietnam War but has larger aspirations. “I should be an American,” The Engineer confides. It’s a desire that doesn’t flatter, as the fantastically satirical Act II showstopper The American Dream proves beyond doubt.
Also beyond doubt: the supernova qualities of Moore, a non-binary performer blessed with phenomenal charisma and brilliant theatrical instincts. Miss Saigon’s connective tissue may be the ill-fated love affair between a US soldier and a Vietnamese bar girl but it’s The Engineer who gives the show its backbone.
This is what colonialism and war have thrown up. A stupendously amoral entrepreneur with allegiance to nothing but personal gain.
The show’s creators, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil, used Puccini’s Madama Butterfly as a template for Miss Saigon. (The Venn diagram of people who admire both would be interesting.)
The Pinkerton equivalent, Chris (Nigel Huckle), falls in love with Kim (marvellous newcomer Abigail Adriano), who is left behind after the fall of Saigon. She has a child, he marries an American woman and no one comes out of the chaos unscathed.
Adriano is an immensely touching Kim, nowhere more so than in I Still Believe, an unwitting duet with Chris’s wife Ellen (sympathetic Kerrie Anne Greenland). Kim’s situation is clearly impossible and it’s impossible not to feel the eyes prickle.
Huckle sings beautifully but draws the short straw with this one-dimensional character. The title of Chris’s overwrought number Why God Why? says it all and his saccharine love duet with Kim, The Last Night of the World, involves him in Miss Saigon’s second-weakest song.
Things are punchier and the music better elsewhere. Kim’s other suitor, the Prince Yamadori equivalent Thuy (imposing Laurence Mossman), makes a strong impact and Nick Afoa has some complexity as Chris’s friend John, who powerfully leads the Act II opener Bui Doi.
The score may be variable but there’s a lot of bang for your buck visually. The plucking of soldiers from Saigon by helicopter is the musical’s most famous, but by no means only, coup de theatre.
There’s plenty of emotional button-pushing too and even when you know you’re being manipulated it’s hard to resist. Kim and Chris’s son Tam is deployed without mercy and is beyond adorable. On opening night tiny Bryce Li played the part. Heaven.
Miss Saigon. Opera Australia. Sydney Opera House, August 25. Tickets: $49-$299. Bookings: (02) 9250 7777 and online. Duration: 2hr 40min including interval. Ends October 13. Melbourne, October 29-December 3.