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MISS SAIGON

Playhouse, Edinburgh, until Fri 25 Jan 0000

What signals do we send about ourselves in the west when we portray the Orient and its people as exotics, rather than folk working through everyday problems just as we do? Alain Boublil and Claude Michel Schonberg’s musical extravaganza, with its representations of a mystical paradise/hell in Vietnam and Bangkok raises this disquieting question. More than a little disturbing is its representation of pagan idolatries in the form of a massive golden statue of Ho Chi Minh and of Asian people always willing to sacrifice themselves for the better comfort of those in the west.

The story is pretty much Madam Butterfly moved south. In it, Chris (Niklas Anderson), one of the last of the many US military personnel in Vietnam, meets pure-as-the-driven-blossom country girl Kim (Joanna Ampil) who’s been seconded to the brothel of Engineer (Leo Tavarro Valdez), a ruthless local businessman. Swept away by the tide of events around Saigon in 1975, Chris is bundled out of the country (by the famous helicopter on stage) leaving Kim never to mount the chopper again.

What with wicked Vietcong commissar Thuy (Robert Vicenzio) to contend with, it all looks like tragedy. Later a newly remarried Chris meets friend John (Kingsley Leggs) a neophite evangelist and former lustful marine who organises a reunion in Bangkok, where Kim is forced to continue entertaining the boys in company with Engineer and a child of whom Chris knows nothing. Tragedy, or what?

What, perhaps. All the same this Cameron Mackintosh plush-fest is beautifully sung and moved, with spectacular brothel sequences combining with moments of intimacy between the slightly dull characters of the lovers. There are grand performances, particularly from Valdez as the creepy brothel keeper with aspirational dreams above his station. It may be grotesquely simplistic on ideological grounds, but that’s not what folk go to see musicals for these days, and it comes recommended as a better example of its kind. (Steve Cramer)

What would Edward Said say?

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\ THE LIST 67