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Jack Kane as Chris tries to make sense of it all on a night that will change his life with Julianne Pundan's Kim in the rusty bed behind. Pictures: Danny Kaan Miss Saigon The Alexandra Theatre ***** There can be few musicals as emotionally intense or visually spectacular as Miss Saigon, a doomed love story set amid a chaotic no man's land of booze, drugs and whores at the fag end of a Vietnam war that had long ago lost any purpose or meaning. Boublil and Schönberg reimagined Puccini's heart-rending Madame Butterfly, transposing it from a story set around the USA's colonial designs on Japan in 1904 to 1975 and America's humiliating defeat in the disastrous and costly war it had waged in Vietnam. As in Butterfly, a US serviceman falls for a local girl but where Butterfly's Pinkerton sees marriage to the teenage Geisha merely as a passing convenience, I do rapidly became did I? So what. GI Chris's affair with the young, inexperienced prostitute Kim, ending in a marriage of sorts, actually meant something to him. The evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese who were at risk . . . or had connections . . . was chaotic creating the all-too human tragedy which is the foundation and strength of the whole musical. Chris's guilt, regrets and love are all laid bare while on the other side of the world Kim's resilience and hopes for her and especially their son – did we mention him? – are there for all to see.
|Julianne Pundan as Kim with her son Tam In Butterfly, the son, Dolore, is an inconvenience, irritation even, for Pinkerton, for Kim, her son Tam elicits a responsibility and feeds already churning emotions in Chris. Tam, incidentally, played by one of eight five and six-year-olds in rotation. Kim is played by Julianne Pundan, on her professional debut, something we had to be told as we would never have guessed. Her role is the emotional rock of the show on which everything else depends, and she does not let us down. She has a lovely voice and produces such a wonderful air of innocence and vulnerability we cannot fail to care about her and her I’d Give My Life for You becomes a real goosebumps moment. Jack Kane's role as Chris is perhaps summed up by one song, Why, God, Why? He's a decent guy drafted into a war he doesn’t understand, where drugs and brothels are the norm, with women bought by the hour, you can play until the money runs out. It’s not who he is and he hates being drawn in. Kim makes him feel human again, feel love . . . just feel again. There is no operatic posturing of the tragic hero, who, three years on is an ordinary bloke with a new life, new wife, with a past he cannot control but now has to face.
Emily Langham as Ellen Emily Langham as his new wife Ellen is a delight, she has a lovely voice, every word clear as a bell and she provides emotional authenticity where we can't fail to feel for her. Here she is discovering her husband of a year she has nursed through his nightmares and flashbacks not only was married in Vietnam but has a son by the wife he left behind physically but, not, it seems, emotionally. Her heartfelt Maybe is a real showstopper. And speaking of show stoppers, Seann Miley Moore as The Engineer is a sort of theatrical thief, a scene stealer, acting as a sort of compère of opportunistic hedonism, a grotesque caricature of capitalist greed and shakedown hustle. Their performance is dark, funny, sinister . . . and perhaps underneath it all, rather sad, a little man hustling desperate, homesick GIs with a sad collection of equally desperate whores with the only bright spot a dream of going to America. Their performance in the star spangled The American Dream is a glitzy, Broadway show spectacular – whether it quite fits in with the narrative is questionable, but it certainly fits into T.he Engineer's narrative. He would do anything . . . or anyone . . . to get to America, and, incidentally, what an Emcee in Cabaret they would make . . . just saying. John Thomas is the Sharpless of Butterfly, Chris's friend, played by Royal Birmingham Conservatoire graduate Dominic Hartley-Harris. It is a solid performance as Chris's friend helping him in what is an insoluble situation. He gives us a powerful rendition Bui Doi, which translates as street children, the children born to Vietnamese mothers in the war. The set and design from Andree D Edwards is fabulous with a towering industrial set up high into the flies, The iconic helicopter scene is clever but perhaps misses the drama of past productions, although, to balance that, it means the production might be a tight fit but it can tour in theatres with small stages. This means audiences where Miss Saigon has never been seen before can experience the magic while the set and excellent huge 13 piece orchestra under musical director Ben Mark Turner bring true West End values on tour. The set is enhanced by a brilliant lighting plot from Bruno Poet, making lighting sympathetic, or romantic, or dramatic as part of the story, while Adam Fisher's sound design is well balanced despite the size of orchestra and Geoge Reeve's projection design for the back wall is a masterpiece in understatement. It gives us starlit nights, twilight, trees, temples, war, scenes, emptions, feelings all adding to the narrative acting out below. The result is an epic musical, operatic in form, sweeping in music and with some great songs such as Sun and Moon and the haunting The Movie in my mind. It was a traumatic time, claiming an estimated 60,000 US servicemen and up to three million Vietnamese, yet it shuns the politics of a war that damaged a generation and instead condenses it, like Butterfly, before it, to a very human story, a man and a mother finding their own solution to love. To Nov 29 Roger Clarke 19-11-25 Miss Saigon returns to Birmingham Hippodrome 23-27 June 2026 |
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