Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Happy 317!
Or as I like to call it… “Kim Finds Out Day!”
Or as I’m coming to think of it, “Happy MISS SAIGON Day!”
Kim being the heroine of MISS SAIGON, and Room 317 being the number of the hotel room where she discovers her beloved Vietnam war-hero husband, Chris, has married another woman, fellow American Ellen, in Act Two of the famed musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, with lyrics by Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr.
A show I love, and cherish, and make it a point to listen to at least once a year, on March 17… aka… 317.
Don’t worry, friends. I did NOT just commit theater community suicide. That happened a long time ago, arguably when I first posted about not liking a Berkeley Rep show and daring to talk about that at Intermission. Which is probably why, seeing as I have nothing to lose by admitting that I love MISS SAIGON, I decided to take today to celebrate more openly because… why not? I needed to follow my last post with something that wasn’t a downer, and I wrote about St. Patrick’s Day last year. So let’s talk MISS SAIGON, and how I saw the final preview on Broadway with my father, then many years later saw it again, during the annual week of Broadway Cares, when we also took a backstage tour since they were offering them in exchange for higher donations. It’s actually the only backstage tour of a Broadway show I’ve ever done, and in many ways was thus, a pretty formative experience. So sure, I have some nostalgia for the show that is separate from the show itself but… I still love the show. I still love the show, and I always feel like… I’m not supposed to say that.
Long before it became a hip show for white people with platforms to virtue signal with by claiming it has nothing to offer, even though it clearly does and has gotten decades of mileage out of that fact, MISS SAIGON, was a high concept musical taking the barest premise elements of Giacomo Puccini’s MADAMA BUTTERFLY, and placing them into the more contemporary context of Vietnam. Written by the same team that had brought the world LES MISERABLES, it was a French operatic drama that, from my perspective, told the story of a naïve young woman whose romance with a naïve young American soldier on the eve of the collapse of the American invasion of Vietnam ends in tragedy when she dies and he is left traumatized and responsible for a child he didn’t know he had fathered, and almost certainly wasn’t prepared to make room for in his life. Melodramatic and reliant on archetypes, to be sure, I still thought it raised interesting questions around personal and political responsibility, and it was probably the first show I’d ever seen that was so openly, blatantly, critical of Western colonialism (starting with the French, who it treats pretty ruthlessly, which is partly why I balk at ideas that the composers lacked an authentic perspective; they have one, it just wasn’t comprehensive… as no perspective is). It also took to task American materialism, how America sold itself to the world, and it offered me an insight into the plight of female characters whose problems weren’t just relationships with men, but being women in a male dominated world that meant their survival, and more to the point, their children’s survival, was often connected to alignment with male power- or lack of alignment.
Was it problematic? Sure. I could tell that even when I first saw it in my teens, and certainly, the casting of Jonathan Pryce in the role of The Engineer for the original London and Broadway productions didn’t help focus the conversation on what merits the material itself had or didn’t have. But years later, when the Broadway revival and subsequent national tour meant that MISS SAIGON was on people’s minds again, I was rather surprised to learn how many people claimed the show itself was harmful, racist, and should basically never be performed again. A stance I always find suspect because, as much as I don’t like, say, the plays of Sarah Kane (which in my eyes perpetuate harmful romanticization of the mentally ill as geniuses and are deeply exploitive of someone who died from her illness), or think WICKED is a flagrant act of de-radicalizing queer material for heteronormative pallets and basically upholds the very things it pretends to criticize, I would never actually call for either (or anything else) to be banned, partly because I recognize people might get something out of these works that I do not, and mostly because I carte blanche don’t believe in censorship. But in addition to these basic principles, I just thought MISS SAIGON actually fell pretty heavily on the right side of history in its portrayal of how Americans didn’t just help facilitate the destruction of another country, but destroyed the lives of individuals in that country, the long-range impact of which would haunt them far past the “end” of the war. In fact, I had long considered it one of the only truly “anti-war” musicals in the mainstream musical theatre, and by and large still do.
Did it portray Vietnam as a war hellscape to be fled from? Sure did, but aren’t most places that are experiencing a war? Certainly, it never claimed that’s all Vietnam could be or had been. Were its primary Vietnamese characters primarily obsessed with getting out of said hellscape and willing to do desperate things to do that? Yes, but… well, there’s a whole lot of evidence that happened, both during Vietnam, and in other places and during other wars. And if all of them but Kim were willing to compromise some ethical standardsI personally never felt it made any of them less sympathetic, including the Engineer. To me, there is no villain in MISS SAIGON, even Thuy; there are just people in a truly shitty situation, trying not to die.
Are America and Americans portrayed any better? Nope. Not even a tiny bit. At best, the American people in the show are portrayed as well intentioned, if utterly and totally hamstrung by their own cultural blindnesses and egos, and in every case their good intentions go awry: Chris fails to save Kim, John fails to facilitate a successful reunion between Tam and his father, and Ellen fails to help either the man she loves or the woman he also loves; they are all, ultimately, as powerless, if not more so, than their Vietnamese counterparts. As for the land itself: we never see America, so we never see whether it lives up to the expectations of the Vietnamese characters, be they the grotesque lusts of the Engineer, the idealized paradise of Gigi, or the peaceful haven of prosperity that Kim longs for. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I think that’s partly because the authors rely on us knowing first hand how much these characters seeking a new life will be disappointed. To me, it’s very apparent the America sought by the refugees is a myth; their buying into it is meant to bring home how desperate the circumstances they are escaping have become. The Americans buying into it to, have again and again their own blindnesses thrown their face, their crassness laid bare in how they treat the people of the country they forcibly occupy in Act One, financially exploit in Act Two. Considering that the intended audience of the show was Americans, it's actually pretty startling how much it doesn't make us look good.
Arguments that the show upholds white/western supremacy seem to miss the part where the show ends happily for nobody, because the past can’t be changed, and there’s no version of the past where America did the good that America thought it was there to do- or at least said it was. That some of the individual Americans come to realize that and seek to make amends is character arc, not an excuse for their actions. Chris is both repentant AND wrong, and when Kim dies in his arms you know he will never truly recover- and he knows this too. All the lives in MISS SAIGON are shattered by American over-confidence and Western colonialism. Kim is arguably the only one who achieves any kind of peace, reclaiming power in the only way she knows how. Only in Tam is there a possibility of redemption for the West, and resolution for the East, but tyhat all depends on what the surviving characters do next. Something we never get to see, arguably because we are waiting still, decades later.
And sure, that’s not the only way you could read, watch, direct or act MISS SAIGON… but that’s the beauty of a work of a art, right, and especially one intended to be performed: our relationship to it changes with time. So long as we’re allowed to have one.
It's funny, because there are real actual threats to the foundation of America and the lives of millions of people right now, but part of me is more terrified to write this, because OMG, what if those people in the theater scene who don’t like me, decide to add this to the pile of reasons they already don’t like me? Well, first off, they’d have to actually be reading, in which case… Hey Girl, why are you reading the substack of someone you don’t like, find something better to do… and second, because I’m barely involved with the theatre scene anymore anyway, if this is the nail the seals the coffin… well, here, let me get you a hammer because to quote a famous musical that is totally straight people appropriating queer culture, “If that’s love, then it comes at much too high a cost.”
The older I get the less stakes I have in trying to get hired by people who were never going to hire me in the first place because the more I realize that usually had more to do with how we might not agree on topics like this, than it ever had to do with my talent, my ability to create a quality product, and the generally high standard of respect which I afforded my collaborators. I’ve had my share of bad days, temper tantrums, dropped balls, and tense relationships, but none of that seems to matter any more than my list of accomplishments and good references, so mostly when I consider my personal glass ceiling. I think it's the fact that I didn’t go to State, and I don’t think having an open, un-curated Google document (on which, by the way, I was never mentioned) where anyone can anonymously and without burden of proof or responsibility accuse people of misconduct is an ideal or effective way to deal with very really issues in the local community (and let’s be honest… in the long run hasn’t changed much; most the people on there are still running the scene). Less stakes in winning approval for anything but what I bring to the table mean that more and more I realize how often I have not said a contrary perspective, for fear of it becoming a controversial perspective, and while some of the times my restraint has served me in the moment (after all, we must all ask ourselves “is this my hill to die on?” now and then or risk a lifetime of conflict) cumulatively I have found myself more often than not, wishing I had spoken up, far less with some intention to change someone’s mind, than with the much simpler yet more profoundly impactful intention of just being sure my thoughts weren’t taken for granted- be they in agreement or otherwise.
At the end of the day, I rarely make an argument to win it, so much as to be sure my perspective is heard. Because my perspective matters. Because I matter. But like anyone who makes art, I don’t just want to listen to other people. I also want to be heard. That’s why I went into art, not therapy.
In the theater community there is a tendency to conflate Listening, with Agreeing, which in turn leads to expectations, some of which might be met, and some of which may not, and all of which lay the groundwork for deeper division when people who were there to listen, suddenly find themselves at the center of accusation when they fail to act as anything less than in total agreement to whoever has the mic- and the power to hire. Time and time again I have watched good people with good things to say, be shot down if those contributions weren’t 100 % in line with expectations of what will happen that were formed long before any kind of agreement process was engaged with. I’ve watched even more good art be dismissed without even the tiniest bit of analysis, let alone consideration for the folks who might love that art, and do so thoughtfully I might add, not blind to its shortcomings but perhaps fascinated by them, excited by the challenge of them, as Dave Molloy and Jane Chen once were when they staged a black box production of the show in a high school metal shop. A production I saw, and loved, not for everything it took out of MISS SAIGON, but everything it found there.
Not that every production has to work so hard to find what’s redeemable in MISS SAIGON, or necessarily should. And in no way is this me saying that the folks who don’t like MISS SAIGON should be shouted down or obligated to produce productions of it. Nor is it me saying that people who do like MISS SAIGON should be put on platforms and empowered to do productions of it just to keep it going. We don’t have to do MISS SAIGON any more than we don’t have to ban MISS SAIGON. Whether it remains relevant to audiences and of interest to artists is entirely up to fashion, passion, and passion that is fashion. Nobody has to like the show, or think its merits outweigh its potential negative impact (something, frankly, we should be considering with EVERY SHOW that attempts to have something impactful to say), or that it’s anything more than misguided, misogynist, racist garbage.
It kind of is.
But for a lot of people, it is also nmore than that. I’m one of them. For me, it'll always be one of the shows that got me into theater, that broadened my idea of what kind of stories could be told, and with what scope. It got me excited about theater as a form, and pushed my idea about what a musical could be. I'm always going to be influenced by it, and I'm always going to find parts to admire. This exchange, for instsance, between Kim and Ellen. I have always loved how it built, the shift from Ellen's indifference to Kim (just some Asian woman, probably the maid) to the realization that she is the woman they are there to find. A feeling, breathing, living woman, who up until that moment she had not allowed to be real. It's a song depicting the humanization of the other, for the other.
Happy 317 to those who celebrate.
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Hello!
Thank you for reading!
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Be well. Reach out. You are a light.
Stuart
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