Applause for the welcome announcement.
Applause for the mobile phone warning. Rapturous applause for the house
lights dimming. Three ecstasies before a note had sounded. Never have I
seen an audience so determined to love every tiniest aspect of a show.
Small wonder this revival broke world records for opening ticket sales.
The thing is, they’re so nearly totally right.
Producer Cameron Mackintosh describes this 25th-anniversary staging as
grittier than the 1989 original. Despite the antithetical nature of
grit to West End musicals, director Laurence Connor looks to have gone
against the grain as far as he reckons he reasonably can. The famous
helicopter still appears for the Saigon evacuation, but it is amid a
scene of real upheaval; a dragon dance takes place before a huge golden
image of Ho Chi Minh, but this contrasts with a palpable sense of
degradation in the sex-club scenes set in Saigon and later in Bangkok.
Despite the familiarity of the plot (recycled, with full
acknowledgement, from
Madame
Butterfly), one feels at moments that something is truly at
stake as young Kim struggles to get her child to America whilst his
ex-Marine father Chris tries in vain to avoid the consequences of his
past conduct.
Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s work in general shows at
least as much expert craft as inspired flair; a sung-through musical is
always ambitious, and this one rarely descends into plonking banality.
(If new Act Two number “Maybe” is undistinguished, nor does it jar as a
late stitch-in.) This outing is also devoid of the “yellow-face”
casting of Caucasian actors which led to controversy a generation ago.
Filipino Jon Jon Briones as club manager the Engineer (the role
originated by Jonathan Pryce with eye prosthetics) exudes glee from
every pore during his numbers, even when singing of how depressed he is
in Bangkok; Eva Noblezada as Kim has a belting voice, at times too
strident for the innocent 17-year-old she is portraying.
Yet the tale, like its predecessor, still relies on orientalism, a
shorthand list of ways in which They Over There are different from Us.
In its way Engineer’s exuberant fantasia “The American Dream” suggests
a corresponding occidentalism, but this is not enough to counteract the
exotic assumptions that inform the piece. This is a severe drawback,
but it is the only one in what is otherwise an exemplar of its kind.
Written for the Financial
Times.