Sunday 8th September 2013 by Will Langdale
The exciting news this week in the West End is, of course, Miss Saigon’s triumphant return. Announced a few months back, tickets are finally available for Cameron Mackintosh’s magnificent reimagining of Madame Butterfly in the Vietnam War, and we’re desperately excited to see the production when it opens next year. The show’s won a host of awards, including two Oliviers and three Tonys, and this is a great chance to see a refreshing new update of an absolute classic.
The plot of Miss Saigon follows a young Vietnamese woman who falls in love with an American GI at the cusp of Saigon’s fall, which ended American’s involvement in Vietnam. After a brief but passionate affair, the GI returns home leaving the girl alone and pregnant. A complicated web of desire meets the intense international politics of the 70s, and the result is a tragic and dramatic musical about the tragedies of war and desire.
Miss Saigon was a groundbreaking musical when it first appeared in 1989, running for over four thousand performances spanning a decade, finally closing in 1999. The show stormed both the West End and Broadway, and the score – written by the incredible Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil – was their second massive hit after Les Miserables. This will be the second time the two titans of musical theatre run concurrently in major London theatres.
Yet this doesn’t look like it’s going to be a straight revival. Cameron Mackintosh, producing the show, has been keen to emphasise just how thematically relevant Miss Saigon is to the current state of the world.
“If anything the tragic love story of Miss Saigon has become even more relevant today,” he said.
“In the last 25 years our country has become involved in similar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the way we weren’t in Vietnam and the American Dream has been buffeted by the reality of recent history. The new production has taken a more gritty and realistic approach to the design than the operatic original but still delivers the power and epic sweep of Boublil and Schönberg’s great score.”
It feels fantastic to know that such a stunning show will be back in the West End, and that it can be appreciated by people that might not even have been alive when it first appeared! Productions of Miss Saigon have been seen by over 35 million people worldwide, but there has never been so relevant a time as now to bring it back.
We can’t wait.