Direct from its smash London run, Cameron Mackintosh's stunning new production of Boublil and Schonberg's legendary musical Miss Saigon lands on Broadway in March, 2017, featuring its acclaimed stars Eva Noblezada and Jon Jon Briones.
Set in 1975 during the final days of the American occupation of Saigon, Miss Saigon is an epic love story about the relationship between an American GI and a young Vietnamese woman. Orphaned by war, 17-year-old Kim is forced to work as a bar girl in a sleazy Saigon nightclub, owned by a notorious wheeler-dealer known as "The Engineer." John, an American GI, buys his friend Chris the services of Kim for the night- a night that will change their lives forever.
Don't miss this "thrilling, soaring and spectacular" (The Times of London) musical when it returns to Broadway this spring for a limited engagement.
Still, Miss Saigon was, and is, a phenomenon, and this production, directed by Laurence Connor, is sensational in every way: visually and sonically (often painfully so). Most important, it's brilliantly cast, to continue the baseball analogy, with leads from the Mackintosh farm team who are more than ready for the big leagues.
But then the unrelieved hyper-emphasis of Laurence Connor's direction basically squashes whatever might be good in Miss Saigon. Certainly the rather delicate (if leather-lunged) performance of Eva Noblezada as Kim doesn't get far across the footlights; you can hardly find her half the time. Indeed, none of the signposts and pointers an audience might look to for advice about what's going on work properly: The sound is unspecific, the lighting is overbusy, and the set makes it seem as if everyone in the cast lives in everyone else's hovel. It is only in that Constructivist parade, and a few similar scenes, that the pressure is equalized between the overwrought style of the production and its overwrought content. But it's not a good sign when the most cogent parts of a musical about American perfidy are the ones that borrow a totalitarian aesthetic.
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