‘Vietnaaaaam! Hey look, I mean you no offence, But why does nothing here make sense? Whyyyyy God? Show your hand! Whyyy can’t I understand?” The warbling is from the filmed version of that stately stage musical Miss Saigon, by Claude Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil (which opened on Broadway in 1991), complete with its spectacular helicopter.
It’s the modern reworking of Madam Butterfly, all about an American GI who falls for a Vietnamese bar girl in 1975, just as America is about to hightail it out of the war zone. The lines quoted are from Chris, the square-jawed hero played by Alistair Brammer, an actor resembling Chris “Robin” O’Donnell. He has fallen for Kim (Eva Noblezada), a terribly pure’n’demure Vietnamese girl exploited by a horrid nightclub manager nicknamed the Engineer (Jon Jon Briones), who is running a joint full of bikini-wearing girls for rent to visiting US soldiers. But just in case anyone is disappointed not to see the star herself in sexy get-up, later in the action Kim will also appear in revealing bikiniwear.
This show, with its unvarying, blaring musical numbers, is a long haul. Kim’s cheongsam-wearing innocence is as exotically and quaintly imagined as the club’s gyrating dancers. But it should be admitted that here, unlike in Hollywood’s Vietnam tradition, the lives of Vietnamese people are of equal importance to the US contingent.
