When cash is deleterious to creativity: The profligately staged Miss Saigon.

By E. L Hardy

"I don't want realism, I want magic!" (Tennessee Williams, A Street Car Named Desire)

I'd never seen Miss Saigon before, not unless you count the production in my head. And it's probably safe to say I put off seeing the recent monster of a production until now because I was aware of my admittedly unrealistically high expectations. I certainly wasn't going to be in a position to review. Not objectively. Not fairly. But I also couldn't ignore it forever, so here be a blog - a bit about me, a bit about Miss Saigon, and a bit about the irreplaceable function of the imagination in theatre...

The Complete Symphonic recording of Miss Saigon, with Joanna Ampil as Kim and Peter Cousens as Chris, was the first musical soundtrack I ever bought - I remember because it cost a bloody fortune. I was twelve at the time and earning £2.70 a week doing pot wash in a pub kitchen at weekends, but it was worth every squeeze of fairy liquid; I bloody loved it. Eager to earn my musical theatre stripes, I started to extend my knowledge beyond the limited repertoire of Blood Brothers, Oliver, Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat, Tell me on a Sunday (Mother's cassette of choice), Les Miserables and the Wizard of Oz. It was the beginning of an insatiable curiosity - one that lasted throughout my teens and into... well... the present day.

Before the time of Spotify, YouTube, or having access to a computer (let alone fan-dangled stuff like Wi-Fi or Soundcloud), this was an expensive mission for a working class teenager from Kent to undertake. But undertake it I did. Disc one and two of the recording in question took pride of place in mine and my sister's state-of-the-art (Argos) multi-deck CD and cassette stereo and remained securely in place (much to Charlotte's horror) until it was eventually replaced by the Rent soundtrack and something in the charts by Janet Jackson. I dedicated an unhealthy portion of time - evenings, weekends, whenever I wasn't elbow deep in soap suds and dishwater - to imagining the scenes, memorising (and attempting to emulate) each number, swaying my arms around like a mad woman, conducting and bringing off my invisible orchestra (so to speak).

So, as my school friends will confidently attest, I was a 'unique' girl, but my personal interpretation and understanding of Miss Saigon, meticulously gleamed from the recording, was as valid as any other. 15 years later, I've moved on, but the resonances of my relationship with the show left a notable dent. Of course, due to the very nature of the creative imagination, we each have different ideas and construct different images. However, what became evident from the opening sequence of the 2014 Miss Saigon revival was that my imagination, on this occasion, was surplus to requirement.

The detail in this production is exquisite; the set, the scenery, the costumes - realist, lavish, accurate. Not trusting the audience to guess the show's context and setting from the title, the design leaves little space for confusion or misinterpretation. This I find, let's say, problematic. Musical theatre is, in my opinion at least, fundamentally unrealistic. It is a form that asks the audience to accept characters spontaneously exploding into song. In order to suspend our disbelief, musicals are often staged with an element of the magical, the suggested, the surreal, the heightened.

Why are we pretending that Boublil and Schönberg wrote a documentary? Miss Saigon is a musical and don't we love it for that very reason? Boublil's lyrics are bursting with imagery, but the images have all been painted for us. The power of imagination (the essence of theatre) is disregarded in favour of the bling. Imagination requires you to bring yourself to the story, rather than permitting you to switch off and simply observe as the plot is delivered direct to your lap with a bulky thud. (This is what, I think, distinguishes Matilda from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Stimulation of the imagination is what's missing here, preventing us from feeling the impact of this cataclysmic story.

In many ways, the production met even my irrational demands. Musically, for example, it ticked every box. The through-sung score combines song after beautiful song, arranged and played with great passion and sung with the finesse that you can almost take for granted given the ever expanding ocean of musical theatre talent from which to fish. Despite being a fierce admirer of Ampil, to the extent that even Lea Salonga's original recording was received with disdain from my stubborn 13 year-old self, I adored Eva Noblezada's vocal performance as the dolorous Kim. Alistair Brammer's Chris is everything you could want it to be. Attractive, curly haired and burly, Brammer sings Why God Why with such contentment and ease that it feels as if he is still floating in the double bed above. Equally, having moved on with his new wife Ellen, he rages with the torment and grief he feels for being an American and having failed "to do good".

But this brilliance is clouded by the aforementioned STUFF. The licentious club girls were suitably discontented - the scenes uncomfortable, rough and grotty. But even these seemed somehow glitzy and plush, (a little more Playboy mansion than wartime Vietnam), assiduously detailed and consequently lacking the putrid edge of something more disturbing and desperate. Then, when a giant red dragon is paraded onto the stage - a stage already crammed with inappositely acrobatic soldiers - I momentarily questioned my sanity. Was this Miss Saigon, the pantomime? Was 'The Hoff' set to descend from the gods on an automated magic carpet? Alas, no.

Still, I didn't need to see a dragon puppet or some backflips (impressive as they were); I needed to feel the intensity and bravery of the soldiers at war. This would have been more powerful than what felt like a demonstration of where my ticket money went.

Act II is somewhat redemptive. It could have been directed by a different person. (Sorry, Laurence Connor). There is stillness. More (*some*) subtlety. Everyone's favourite mercenary, The Engineer (played by the perfectly charismatic Jon Jon Briones) demonstrates the compelling and transformative power of an empty stage, free from frills, in the epic story song American Dream. The combination of Connor's showmanship, Boublil's vivid lyrics and William David Brohn's orchestrations made palpable a story that had, until now, passed me by. When his dream does eventually become a theatrical reality, in a flurry of cars, glitter and cash, the gratification has at least been earned. The chaotic frisson of Kim's nightmare is equally effective - horrific enough to haunt and torment her years later. I liked the helicopter. Its appearance was unexpected (following tantalising use of sound effects and projection) and, once again, earned. It does of course distract from the writhing agony of the lovers violently torn apart... but it's kinda cool nonetheless.

So this revival, caught in a trap of verisimilitude and concerned with the wrong sort of brilliance, left me feeling like I'd watched a really lovely train pass in front of me and off into the distance. I'd rather it had stopped to let me on-board to travel off to Vietnam with it. I longed for Miss Saigon to be stripped of its elaborate fairground mechanics and for the heart of the musical I once fell in love with to be revealed. But then Cameron Macintosh, the putative producer of producers, can't just cater to my whims and fancies now, can he?

P.S. On the question of preconception: To what extent does your past relationship with a show hamper your ability to objectively critique a current production? I doubt that a critic can ever entirely escape the shackles of expectation; you need only like a venue, or an actor or a song to decide how good something could potentially be prior to seeing it. If something is billed as "the best musical of all time" it's likely that it won't live up to its own hyperbolic hype. (It works the other way around too). There was no escaping it with Saigon. I wanted and expected the world. What, aside from disappointment, could possibly have followed? How could I have formally reviewed this show? I can be actively aware and deliberately cautious of my preconceptions and bias, but I can't disconnect my heart from my head or my head from my heart, nor should any theatre loving person be expected to.

@E_L_Hardy

@postscriptjour

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