Miss Saigon Previews Thread — Page 13

adamgreer said: "Babe_Williams said: "Chris learns he has a child and Kim is alive, his first response is "it's too late, I have a new life."



Ellen's response to Kim's proposition that they take Tam: "we want kids of our own."



what drew kim to Chris or vice versa other then a night of hot sex? Chris doesn't ask Kim about her life until after they he offers her money. What do we know about Kim in the second half of the show other then she is still pining for Chris and loves her son? I like this show, I enjoy the music, but these aren't nuanced or developed characters by any stretch.



One of the the lines that bothers me is the line where Chris says "you are the only thing that I care for here." Kim is an object, by his own choice of words. Also, my statements here are based on my viewing of the show years ago and the original London cast recording. If some of this dialogue has changed, I was not aware.



Ellen also immediately assumes Kim is the maid when they first meet. She then thinks Kim must be John's wife, which never made sense to me, given how close the musical says John and Chris are. All that time together and they never introduced their spouses to each other? It doesn't make sense.



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Kim thinks Ellen is John's wife

I was so appalled by the image of this deliberate ripping apart that I had to sit down and catch my breath. I suffered for the mother as though I might see my own little boy leaving me forever and I suffered for the child as though in my early youth I had been forcibly removed from my parents. Was that not the most moving, the most staggering example of 'The Ultimate Sacrifice', as undergone by Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly, giving her life for her child?

I'm appalled by the final sentence in the quote.. It undercuts the rest of the paragraph. Yes, the photo is heartbreaking, but to make the leap to Madama Butterfly is troubling. Was the mother in the photo a bar girl? Did the mother in the photo kill herself? Did the authors attempt to find out?

What is shown in the picture is not unique. I can understand, after seeing it, being moved to write a play or musical. What I can't understand is the need to use a stale old trope as a starting point.

A Director said: "

> Kim is like a woman in an abusive relationship who gives up her child to the foster care system in a desperate attempt to give the child a better life. We all know the foster care system isn't a walk in the park and there's no guarantee his or her life will actually be any better, but it's the actions of a woman doing what she thinks is best in the direst of situations.

Do mothers who give up their child to the foster care system usually kill themselves?

No, of course not. I'm pointing out the complexities of a situation for any women to willing give up a child by any means. I'm arguing here for Kim's complexity- not that this a perfect show, like it's impossible to find any fault with it, but that this woman is a not a submissive, cardboard cutout Asian character. As I said, I think she is strong, smart and has grit and determination in spades.

>I agree that Chris is a far less complex character than Kim and he does indeed view her as an object- she symbolizes something beautiful and peaceful in the midst of the hell that surrounds him. She is an escape and ultimately nothing more. He gets back to the States and attempts to move on with his life. We never hear a solo from him in act that expresses his current feelings about Kim or the fact that he's a father. His character is lacking, but I don't think Kim shares his same deficiencies.

If you understand this, why are you unable to understand that people are bothered by the way Chris thinks about Kim?


I never said I don't understand why people are bothered by Chris or any of the soldiers. In fact, isn't that the point? That we should be horrified by the way the women are treated? I always thought that was the author's intent. No? They want to expose the horrors of war. Yes, we women are all too often merely objects to be bartered and traded in wartime, and it's not just during the Vietnam war, but all conflicts. Look at a play like Eclipsed that dealt with women being used as currency during the Liberian civil war. Of course Miss Saigon portrays these women as objects because that's what they were. It's the disgusting truth of war and we should in turn be disgusted by it, but that's not the same as being disgusted by the musical. The engineer successfully turns Kim into an object and both John and Chris treat her as such (Thuy too), but through all of that she perseveres and finds strength and power through her struggle. Surely you can't deny that Vietnamese and Thai woman were treated as objects during the this time period (and still today)? Why is the musical bad for putting this horrible truth in the spotlight?

The women in Eclipsed are objects to the (unseen) male characters, and yet they're extremely complex characters. I'll admit they're more complex than Kim, but my point is that characters can be both unfortunate objects in their life situation and be still be complex at the same time.


>I don't think Kim's complexities are on the level of Bobby or George and Dot, but for a mega-musical heroine she is far more complex and developed than Christine or Cosette.

This is not the point. Bobby, George, Dot, Christine, Cosette are white; Kim is Vietnamese. For many theatergoers, she is the only Vietnamese character they know.

I was pointing out that Miss Saigon is a certain genre of musical that is perhaps better known for bombastic emotion and characters painted in broad strokes, and yet Kim is afforded more complexity than her genre counterparts.





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Like I said before, I don't hate Miss Saigon. I'll probably see it when it tours again. But I think it's problematic. Also, I don't think we should excuse the issues of the show as being "based on things that really happened" unless they were based on true events--not just a messy thrown together generalization of things that might have happened during war times.

WhizzerMarvin said: "
Maybe I'm completely off base and someone can explain how Kim is just another stereotype and not as complex as I imagine her to be, but after years of familiarity with the show I don't see it.


"

I'm mostly a lurker of 10 years, but this topic is personal to me as a Vietnamese-American whose family and friends actually escaped the Vietnam War. So let me take a leap here and participate in the dialogue.

The question WhizzerMarvin asks here is the essence of where this discussion has gone off track. While the debate could go on ad nauseum about whether or not Miss Saigon is good story-telling (Kim's complexity, brilliant score, balanced story), these topics are a distraction from larger issues with Miss Saigon. I have heard the repeated argument that Miss Saigon is story created by Caucasians for a predominantly Caucasians audience. Yet, this accusation also doesn't fully capture the problems of Miss Saigon, for if you read the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning book Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a White author can do a great job telling Vietnamese immigrant stories from a Vietnamese immigrant perspective. From the glasses of Vietnamese immigrant whose family lived through this, my biggest problem with Miss Saigon is that it reinforces and romanticizes a white savior narrative that distracts from and does not do justice to the complex, resilient, and rich stories of the Vietnamese diaspora.

I cringe hearing Chris sing about saving Kim: "So I wanted to save and protect her. Christ, I am an American! How could I fail to do good?" Sure, my grandparents, aunts/uncles, and parents yearned to get to the United States during and after the Vietnam War, and while they ran into challenges (not the same ones as Kim in Miss Saigon), they overcame tremendous obstacles to make it happen without (or in spite of) a figure like Chris. This story would have been more intellectually stimulating had Kim not pinned all her hopes on Chris to rescue her. I shouldn't take the bait here, but to answer Dave's question about how Miss Saigon might have been written more culturally sensitive, I would be more supportive of Miss Saigon if the story ended with Kim and Tam on a plane to the US because she found another way to get out their situation.

Pulling the lens back even further, the story of Kim, Chris, and the Engineer represent a single, fictionalized story of the war, but I fear that audience members have come away thinking, "I really understand the plight of the Vietnam war immigrants." While I don't mean to accuse you all of making this gigantic leap, I hope it's not unfair to say there are too many people who walked away from the theatre thinking "I know that was fiction, but so much of that actually happened!" and did nothing else to further their understanding of Vietnamese diaspora. I'll be honest and say I didn't read any further after seeing Eclipsed, even though it was a moving story.

Again, I can't emphasize enough that I'm not trying to claim that any of you believe Miss Saigon to be true story. I don't think it's racist to enjoy Miss Saigon, but in 2017, we all should yearn for something better. The theatre community can do better to promote a more accurate voice of the Vietnamese immigrant history. In the late 80s, the children of the Vietnam War, like me, were still very young, and at that time works like Miss Saigon, and even Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, began the conversation about the complexities created by this war. I would love to see more playwrights like Qui Nguyen continue the conversation in a richer light and bring more roles for Asian actors and actresses to the stage.

Updated On: 3/11/17 at 05:50 PM

WhizzerMarvin - Here are comments from the authors about their show. From my point of view, you are giving them too much credit.

MISS SAIGON, when we started writing, we were inspired by the idea of updating the story of sacrifice and the doomed love story of MADAM BUTTERFLY in a modern environment. But suddenly because we decided it was going to happen during the Vietnam War, which for us was a fabulous moment, being everyone is dancing on the edge of the volcano and that makes the stakes much higher.

You can raise the stakes and the music can follow and all that. It was amazing for us when MISS SAIGON opened in New York last time, not this time. We suddenly found ourselves in the middle of controversies. One was the equity controversy and the casting and importing of English actors to America, or non-Asians playing Asian characters. But the second one which was as important was that we realized that the Vietnam War wounds had not healed yet and we found the show had become a show about the Vietnam War and the love story and the sacrifice at the heart of the show was like unimportant. Some journalists were only talking about our opinion of the Vietnam War, which we didn't have an opinion about really.

The great thing with this production, which was a complete new production coming to Broadway, is that we have kind of taken back our story to its roots. The love story, the sacrifice, the mother's story with her child, are all again at the heart of the story and the war and events are back in the background where they belong. I hope that the people coming to see MISS SAIGON this time, and especially the young people too young to see it the first time, are going to see what we have written and not just another show about the Vietnam War. We've never written a show about the Vietnam War because we don't feel invited to do that.

Claude-Michel: The fact that it was possible to take MADAM BUTTERFLY's story and update it in the 70's is the best proof that the problem in the time of the original story could be used today to write the same because there is still value. It can happen tomorrow between an American G.I. and girl in Syria or Iraq. I learned yesterday that there were 700 American soldiers fighting in Iraq. It can happen anywhere. Originally, I wanted to do it when the American Army invaded the island of Grenada.

Alain: And no one says today that THE SOUND OF MUSIC is a musical about World War II. And it's the same! Hopefully, now MISS SAIGON is going to be a musical about a doomed love story in the time of a war. It happens to be the Vietnam War.

"I cringe hearing Chris sing about saving Kim: "So I wanted to save and protect her. Christ, I am an American! How could I fail to do good?" Sure, my grandparents, aunts/uncles, and parents yearned to get to the United States during and after the Vietnam War, and while they ran into obstacles (not the same ones as Kim in Miss Saigon), they overcame tremendous obstacles to make it happen without (or in spite of) a figure like Chris."



Isn't that the point? We are SUPPOSED to cringe. it's a ridiculous statement (and in the Canadian production, sometimes got a laugh from the audience). Miss Saigon to me is very much about the myth of the white saviour and the failure of the American Dream, and to think otherwise is to miss the complexity of it.

Updated On: 3/13/17 at 07:29 PM

Interesting discussion. I tend to take the approach that the show is indeed a deconstruction of the white saviour male / passive, adoring Asian female stereotype, even if not the most subtle or artful example of such. However, I also agree that seeing more varied types of Asian stories on stage would be a good thing. As a side note, I also wonder if some of the "greatest love story" stuff is more for marketing purposes than anything else. That phrase is going to sell more tickets to a sizeable portion of the audience (read: us white people) than "white people screw things up: the musical", more accurate though the latter may be.

Although I don't necessarily feel bound to agree with what the show's creators thought they were writing about, here are some further thoughts from Richard Maltby (IIRC) on Chris, from the book 'The Musical World of Boubil and Schonberg' by Margaret Vermette:

"The characters make the story, and Alain and I spent endless amounts of time talking about the characters and what sort of people they were, especially Chris. He was the centre of our discussions because he was the character furthest away from Alain and Claude-Michael's sensibility. In their early draft he was the same callous American that Pinkerton was. In order to build up the backstory we started asking ourselves questions like, 'Where was he from and why was he in Vietnam?' Well, we decided he was probably drafted, probably a redneck, yet his best friend was probably black, because in the war odd things happen. In the South a redneck would not talk to a black guy, but in the war they could become buddies. He probably served in Vietnam and went home after the war. But veterans were not welcomed back. He had nothing going for him at home - no trade, no experience - so he re-upped. All the Americans in Vietnam in 1975 were there by choice. In the army he would have been well paid, better than in the United States. The work was relatively minimal; he probably drove a car for somebody in the Embassy, and he was in the pleasure pit of the world. So we worked out the facts of what it meant to be an American in Saigon at that time, in order to place Chris in context. He ceased to be a Pinkerton. While not intellectual, Chris gets what's happening in Vietnam. He understands that there's something wrong in still going out to the bars, with the drinking, the drugs, and the bargirls, when the city is about to fall. He doesn't want to do it anymore. In his non-intellectual way he understands the big issues. Basing Chris in reality allowed us to write the breakdown scene in Act II. I'm more proud of that than anything else, because in this scene Chris admits to all sorts of unspeakable things. It's not just the breakdown of a man who fell in love and couldn't help the girl. It reflects the nervous breakdown of America's involvement in Vietnam and hit has big reverberations. Chris admits that he never really understood Kim or her country, and at the end fled back to the safety of a woman from his own world. Chris is the most interesting character to me and funnily enough he turned out to be the centerpiece of the casting of the show. When the show had a strong Chris, as it did when we opened in London with Simon Barrowman, then it really works, but if it had a weak Chris then the story lost focus. Kim was a more straightforward character..."

Updated On: 3/11/17 at 08:10 PM

That means a lot, WhizzerMarvin! I value your opinions and analyses so much.

I had wanted to catch Chinglish, but was in graduate school at the time. I had read such good things about it, and I hope I get another opportunity to see it.

MarvinWhizzer, after reading A Director's interview with the authors and Fan123's snippet, it seems like there were ways the writers were trying to highlight American arrogance, but I don't think the line in question is one of them ("Christ I am an American..." . For better or worse, the writers are heavy handed, and they let us know when we should think the characters are being ridiculous. At the end of The Confrontation, for example, when Ellen and Chris propose that Kim and Tam stay in Thailand with their financial support, the writers have John sing "you are talking like fools!" As an extension to the line "Christ I am an American!", songs like Bui Doi and Please also make me cringe, and I can't imagine the writers wanted this much cringe-factor :)

Fan123's highlights into Chris are really interesting, but I don't think it's far-fetched to call Chris a flawed hero/protagonist (if Walter White and Don Draper can be protagonists, then Chris certainly can too). I have so much respect for veterans and folks in the armed services, as I'm sure we all do, that they should have a character who accurately reflects their struggles too.

To everyone else, it feels like you're all telling me "Look at all the complexities that you've missed!" You're damn right I missed stuff. It would be arrogant to say otherwise, but I think I've understood enough of the play to offer an opinion about what the piece offers as a whole. As I stated in my original post, the discussion about themes, plots, and complexity is a distraction from this yearning I have for stories of Vietnamese immigrants that do our journey justice.

I get that Miss Saigon is art and is open to all sorts of interpretation, but the emphasis of my original post is a lack of roles from an Asian/Vietnamese voice. I am not trying to convince you to stop liking Miss Saigon. Again, my bigger issue is that people have walked away thinking (incorrectly) they've received an education about what it was like for an Vietnamese immigrant after the war. I don't presume any of you think that, but in 2017, we can do a better than Miss Saigon to reflect the voice of the Vietnamese diaspora (Vietgone, for example).

Updated On: 3/12/17 at 09:08 PM

Loving this discussion! I have so much to say - mostly just praise for you all! But for now I will just say to C4b2a3b's point that growing up, Miss Saigon was the only point of reference I had for the Vietnam War. They never taught it in school and I didn't catch other films about it until later in life - not like any of those were kind to the Vietnamese! But as a kid, I really did think I knew all about the Vietnam war because I saw this show. I certainly knew more about it than my peers who knew literally nothing about it. Now, that's not the fault of the creators of this show but I think it does say something. (What it says, I don't entirely know!)

Still, I do remember that the show also provided me an example (albeit fictional) of the victims of a US-led war and in doing so opened my eyes to the realization that the US was fallible. I was a pre-teen and I hadn't seen an example of that prior to seeing this. My history lessons ended at WWII and only spoke of how we "saved the day".

I will also note that the writers are French so I would assume they think most Americans have the foolish idea that they are above the rest of the world and can save everyone.

Thanks all for making such great contributions to this discussion and not getting mean or snarky but bringing up thoughtful points of view. Warms my heart!

Any update on an alternate schedule? Have a ticket for May and would live to try to see Eva.

Babe_Williams said: "Ellen's response to Kim's proposition that they take Tam: 'we want kids of our own.'"

I'm not completely sure what point was being made by this observation, but I find Ellen's response not only plausible, but likely. I have several relatives and friends who have bemoaned their personal struggles to conceive with their respective partners and gone to extraordinary scientific lengths to do so. When I asked them why they did not adopt instead, the reply was always the same: "We want the child to be ours".