Some bars served cheeseburgers made of water buffalo and bootleg Velveeta. The Army radio announcer who broadcast daily traffic reports from a helicopter over the city blithely called himself "Parker Lane," until someone informed the brass on him his subsequent helicopter rides may have been less agreeable.
The cigarettes were similarly stolen, except for locally manufactured ones called Park Lanes, which contained marijuana of uneven quality. The Vietnamese beer, called "33," was believed by American servicemen to be made with formaldehyde. The American beer on sale had been pilfered from the post exchange system, as had the floor-to-ceiling refrigerators in which it was stored, the freezers, the electric fans, even the records in the Japanese jukebox. Her last night's lover would have gone off to take his place in the war, which was very probably beside the office Coke machine in an air-conditioned compartment of the American presence.Įverything was stolen, illegal, or somehow spurious. When Kim gives birth to a boy, the parallel with "Madama Butterfly" is further advanced.Īs the last enormous drunken cockroach scurried under the bar, a weary young woman in smudged Cleopatra eye makeup might be seen wandering across the soiled cement dance floor, one palm upraised against the blinding daylight in the doorway, searching for a piece of costume jewelry detached in some G.I.'s embrace. Chris tries to take Kim home to America, but in the confusion of the evacuation she is left behind. The basic plot of "Miss Saigon," which begins in April 1975, involves Chris (Willy Falk), an American marine, and Kim (Lea Salonga), a Vietnamese "bar girl," who rather suddenly find themselves in love amid the squalor. Americans generally might reflect on what such a show, conceived abroad but designed in this production for New York audiences, suggests about present perceptions, foreign and domestic. Onetime sojourners inSaigon may find themselves contemplating the show's rendering of that tragic and sordid city in the light of their recollections. It comes almost exactly 18 years after the last American troops left Vietnam and on the heels of another American overseas engagement with a far different outcome.Ĭolorful, noisy, shrewdly designed to work its audience into emotional overdrive, "Miss Saigon," which opens Thursday at the Broadway Theater, will likely elicit a variety of responses.
This process can be seen at work in "Miss Saigon," a musical that seems derived in unequal parts from "Madama Butterfly," "West Side Story" and "South Pacific" and is set in wartime Saigon. The popular arts go a long way toward forming a general perception of the common experience. Art is the only method we have for stopping time, so it's our principal means of coming to terms with history.
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