With £700m in gross receipts worldwide, 4,000 performances on Broadway, 375 costumes, one helicopter, and 33 trucks to keep it all in, this is the kind of musical that sends you home humming the statistics. Having finally left the Theatre Royal in London's Drury Lane, Miss Saigon has been wheeled out for a UK tour. And Manchester, as the publicity breathlessly states, is the only place in the northern hemisphere where you can currently see the juggernaut spectacular.
Some might prefer to emigrate to New Zealand in order to avoid it, but there's no denying that Boublil and Schönberg's salty combination of Madam Butterfly's sentiment and Apocalypse Now's table manners packs an almighty wallop, even if it's only through sheer weight of logistics. There are 22 consecutive scene changes - at least 19 of them totally unnecessary - but by the time your senses have been pummelled with 30ft of burnished communist statuary, a celestial Cadillac and the entire brothel quarter of Bangkok, your intellect is in no fit state to protest that you haven't the faintest idea what's going on.
Given that all Cameron Mackintosh's mega-hits are tweaked and workshopped within an inch of their lives, it seems remarkable that Miss Saigon has survived this far with such baffling narrative syntax intact. The book nips and swerves between premonition and flashback, lurching forward to the future, then looping back round on itself to fill us in on what we missed. It makes the most simplistic of stories extremely difficult to follow. You're kept so busy figuring out who's who - and, more importantly, when - that there's little mental space left to care much about any of them.
The one character with a clear trajectory is the sinister figure of the Engineer, a small-time Saigon pimp who lusts for an American's right to wear purple satin flares. The devastatingly louche Leo Valdez has the audience in the palm of his hand, which is a discomfortingly clammy place to be. But Valdez is a star, and it's stars that make the conspicuous extravagance of Miss Saigon worthwhile, even if you get the feeling that you're staring into a supernova, the residual light of a phenomenon that imploded aeons ago.
· Booking until June 29. Box office: 0161-242 2503.
