Review
Journey to 'Saigon' still riveting
There is no helicopter in this scaled-down production of the musical, but some magic remains.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published November 27, 2003
CLEARWATER - The helicopter isn't missed.
Miss Saigon, the last of the blockbuster pop operas from the 1980s, has always been closely identified with its second-act coup de theatre, when a helicopter only slightly smaller than the military Hueys flown in Vietnam lands on the U.S. Embassy rooftop to evacuate the Marines before the fall of Saigon in 1975.
But now the musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg (also the authors of Les Miserables) is touring in a scaled-down production that opened Tuesday night at Ruth Eckerd Hall, and there's no helicopter. Instead, the evacuation is depicted through a combination of video, flashing lights and the pounding thump-thump-thump of rotor blades. The hellish, desperate feel of the scene remains as gripping as ever.
Although it was successful enough to play on Broadway for a decade, and the first-run national tour visited the Tampa Bay area twice, Miss Saigon has never been a completely persuasive show. The frequent shifts in time and barrage of special effects can be hard to carry off. It tries to cover an awful lot of complicated ground for a musical.
So seeing it sans helicopter is a way to test the claim of fans who argue that it is a more delicate, expressive work than the massive hardware surrounding it suggested. (The original also had a floating Cadillac - likewise dispensed with here and not missed.) The plot is from Madama Butterfly in the tale of the doomed love of a Marine named Chris (Alan Gillespie) and the Vietnamese bar girl Kim (Jennifer Paz).
To be sure, this non-Equity tour is still a big production, and the direction by Mitchell Lemsky is not really a rethinking of Nicholas Hytner's original. The boxy set is much the same as in the first-run tour, and the murky lighting and fog produce one of the darkest shows you'll ever see. The Morning of the Dragon pageant, with its red-suited chorus and figure of Ho Chi Minh, is a great piece of communist kitsch.
The cast is anchored by veteran Jon Jon Briones, playing the pimp called the Engineer who runs the barroom beauty pageant that brings Chris and Kim together. His depraved tour de force, The American Dream, is a shocker.
The other principals are young, and if they don't bring a great deal of nuance to their performances, they get the basics of their characters sufficiently down to let the drama work its magic. Rough and ready as it is, as messy and confusing as the staging sometimes seems, Miss Saigon has some of the most riveting emotional encounters in all of musical theater.
Paz is an appealing Kim, with the prettiest songs in the show. Her duet with Chris, The Last Night of the World, is meltingly sweet. Gillespie belts out Chris' tormented high solo Why God Why? with ardent conviction.
As Ellen, who marries Chris after the war, Rachel Kopf has a heartbreaking meeting with Paz's Kim. Wallace Smith, playing Chris' friend, John, who works for an agency that deals with the problems of children of Vietnamese women and American soldiers, delivers a fine Bui-Doi.
However, supporting members of the cast are pretty hit and miss. Miss Saigon is sung all the way through, like an opera, and it was often hard to make out the words.
The small orchestra does a good job with the score, which is no small accomplishment, considering that the definitive recording of the show features a 73-piece symphony orchestra.
Miss Saigon runs through Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall. $37-$65. 727 791-7400 or www.rutheckerdhall.com
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ReviewJourney to 'Saigon' still riveting
