The musical drama "Miss Saigon" is much more than a soaring helicopter looming high over the stage. Since 1989, it has stirred the hearts of audiences as it retells the tragic tale of Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly" where a Japanese woman is abandoned by her American lover in a doomed romance. In "Miss Saigon," the message is the same but the setting has been revised to the Vietnam War in the 1970's in general and in Saigon in particular, centering on a Vietnamese bar girl and her American GI lover.
As the twelfth longest-running Broadway musical in musical theater history, "Miss Saigon," written by Claude Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubill, with lyrics by Boubill and Richard Maltby, Jr., still resonates loudly. This follows the team's success with "Les Miserables" in 1985. Hartford's Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts will unveil this dramatic piece from Tuesday, September 17 to Sunday, September 22.
The inspiration for the work is said to have been a magazine photograph depicting a Vietnamese woman leaving her child at an airport military base, to send him to his father in the United States, to guarantee a better life. This "Ultimate Sacrifice," to Claude Michel Schonberg, became the heart and soul of "Miss Saigon," a musical that has been seen in 25 countries, 246 cities and translated into 12 languages.
The story focuses on an innocent seventeen year old orphan girl named Kim who meets an American GI Chris on her first night working at a disreputable night club in Saigon. While she doesn't win the impromptu "Miss Saigon" contest, Kim is noticed by Chris, a Marine, just as he is preparing to leave the country. Her innocence and beauty draw her to him and he wants to help her, to pay her to leave the sleazy nightclub. Their one night together, engineered by his friend John, starts a saga of love and loss, centering on the son Tam who is conceived, and the plight Kim faces when Chris is forced to go home and abandon her. How their lives intersect three years later, when Chris has established a new life and taken a new wife, Ellen, is at the tragic core of this dramatic piece, an epic opera.
For tickets ($22 and up), call the Bushnell, 166 Capitol Avenue, Hartford at 860-987-5900 or online at www.bushnell.org. Performances are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.
Watch these war-torn lovers and the Eurasian child left as a pawn between them and the impact the Vietnamese War inflicted on its survivors and victims. Can love and the human spirit triumph over tragedy?
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