STAGE REVIEW : ‘Miss Saigon’ Finally Lands on Broadway

NEW YORK —  The helicopter has finally landed at the Broadway Theater, and, as promised, it is the very best helicopter that ever played a Broadway house. What we did not expect from “Miss Saigon,” perhaps, was the awful power of the scene, the stunning agony of the Saigon evacuation in 1975, with soldiers scrambling into the big chopper and Vietnamese rioting to climb aboard, only to be left clinging and sobbing on the chain fence of the U.S. embassy.

The impact of the moment was broken by the audience (at a late preview), which applauded the high-tech special effects as if an acrobat had done a whiz-bang somersault. But in those shocking couple of seconds, “Miss Saigon”--the success and the ferocity of the controversies--finally made sense.

The record $10-million musical, with the record $36-million advance and the unprecedented amount of flak, is an enormously theatrical and effective work that leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

The world’s first Vietnam mega-musical--loosely combining the love story of “Madama Butterfly” with the postwar diaspora to Bangkok--dances on a sliver of a line between exploitation and the show-biz equivalent of passionate commentary about exploitation. It steps over that line, in one direction or the other, about as often as it stays on balance. It is engaging. It is insulting. It is never boring.

Jonathan Pryce, the Welshman whose casting as the Eurasian pimp caused a backstage international incident, is every bit as magnificent as producer Cameron Mackintosh insisted--though you’ll never believe Pryce’s character shares even a chromosome with the Southeast Asian gene pool. Lea Salonga, the young Filipina whose casting as poor-Butterfly-Kim was also opposed by some Asian-American actors, has a deceptively simple strength and a voice with a stirring hollow top. But we’ll have to take it on faith that nobody here could have handled the role.

Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, along with director Nicholas Hytner and lyricist Richard Maltby Jr., have created a big, slick, entertaining, sentimental yet cynical melodrama that plays fast and loose with political history and charges up to $100 for people to feel guilty about orphans left by American servicemen. There is even a pseudo-documentary film that zooms in on war-battered young faces--a shameless device made more repugnant as Kurdish children are repeating media history today.

“Miss Saigon,” which has no spoken dialogue, is far more ingratiating and less pretentious than Boublil-Schonberg’s “Les Miserables.” This is partly because Pryce is such a thrill, partly because the story is such a heartbreaker (Marine makes son with Saigon bar girl, remarries in the States, she sacrifices for the child)--and partly because the Maltby-Boublil lyrics are so trenchant. There is some pathetic treacle (“She is no whore, she’s really more like . . . the April moon!”) but, for the most part, the words are unusually graceful and smart.

The music, alas, is mostly generic Euro-pop, with bits of harmonic Orientalism, derivative doodle-dum filler, and lots of slushy ballads. The better numbers have the hard edge of those early Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice works “Jesus Christ, Superstar” and, especially, “Evita.”

Like subsequent Lloyd Webber, much of this is name-that-tune stuff. Listen for “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” in “You Will Not Touch Him,” Kim’s vow to protect the child fathered by the American Marine, Chris (played with all-American likability by Willy Falk).

Hear “Little Things Mean a Lot” in “Now That I’ve Seen Her,” the lament of the American wife (the good, sympathetic belter Liz Callaway). Sing “Beautiful Girls” from Sondheim’s “Follies” along with parts of Pryce’s triumphant show-stopper, “The American Dream.”

In this one, however, you’ll have far better things to do. Pryce’s character, called the Engineer because he “engineers” liaisons, is a profiteer with Brechtian distance who knows “man is man” and confides “I speak Uncle Ho, I think Uncle Sam.” Pryce, who does not wear the offending yellow makeup anymore, is an astonishingly expressive bag of long bones--a specter that’s mostly forehead, needly features, eyes that laugh out of burned holes in his face. The Engineer wants America so bad he swoons and simulates sex on the hood of a Cadillac, which arrives with a general at the wheel and a Miss Liberty-tootsie in the passenger seat.

The song, an insinuating little two-step, is the personal resume of a survivor who began by pimping his deserted mother:

Selling your mom is a wrench

Perfume can cover a stench

That’s what I learned from the French.

Then it all changed with Dien Bien Phu.

The frogs went home. Who came?

Guess who!

You can sell s--t and get things,

That’s what I learned from the Yanks.

What’s that I smell in the air?

The American dream!

Obviously, “Miss Saigon” may be a dicey prospect among some around here--especially now, when materialism’s feeling a little down at the wallet. But Southeast Asia is trivialized just as brutally as we are. There is the cliche of the submissive Asian woman-victim. There is no distinction between the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, with no explanation for the civil war. Meanwhile, the libidinous soldiers at the bars just seem like boys-will-be-boys guys and the women--bumping, grinding, hanging around men’s waists by their naked thighs--express no nostalgia for their own plundered culture. Their “Movie in My Mind” is American.

When “Miss Saigon” opened in London, there weren’t even any blacks in our Army. That has been fixed, wonderfully, with the casting of Hinton Battle as the soldier who becomes a crusader for the orphans. The only disappointment here is that Battle--a virtuoso dancer with shin-to-nose extensions--doesn’t dance.

This is, however, one of the more dance-driven of the English musicals. Bob Avian puts the right numbingly lurid spin on the degrading bar scenes and, for the Ho Chi Minh City pageantry, combines the slashing unison formations of Communist Chinese ballet with folkloric dragon masks and ribbon dances.

John Napier--the scenic wizard behind almost all the British spectacles--drabs down with beige translucent hangings for most of the Saigon scenes, then expands into poetic, dehumanized grandeur with an 18-foot gold statue of Ho. The helicopter, of course, is his, too.

It is when we look at those tragic faces at the embassy fence, however, that the shortcomings of the musical are most blatant. These images are branded on our consciousness with the power and familiarity of myth. What could possibly be profound enough to support such an apocalypse? The Doors? The “Ride of the Valkyries”? Slushy strings and synthesizers may be sufficient for a Broadway blockbuster, but, compared with real-life drama, they’re pathetic.