Layers of Saigon

Theatre Tulsa takes on one of the world’s most challenging musicals

Rarely are things simple in Miss Saigon, the 1989 musical from the creators of Les Miserables. 

Set during the last days and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the show tells the story (adapted from Pucci’s opera Madama Butterfly) of Kim, a young Vietnamese woman under the questionable protection of the Engineer, a pimp who runs a Saigon bar. A soft-hearted Marine, Chris, falls in love with her. The consequences are tragic for everyone. 

Theatre Tulsa chose to open its 93rd season with the show—which has never before been produced by an Oklahoma theatre company—because it was “something other theatres wouldn’t go near,” Director Jarrod Kopp said. “We just keep looking for bigger and bigger challenges.” 

Bringing Miss Saigon to the local stage involves several layers of complexity. One layer is technical. Rapidly changing locales—from a seedy club to the U.S. Embassy to a home in the American South—keep the production team on its toes for the nearly three hours it takes to tell the tale. 

“It’s known as being one of the most challenging shows, on a technical level, in musical theatre history,” Kopp said. 

Kopp moves things along swiftly—sometimes too swiftly, as when it took me several minutes to realize that three years were supposed to have passed between one scene and the next.

Sound quality was also an issue on opening night: The principals were over-amplified, and the chorus was barely audible. But the company stayed fully invested throughout the relentless frenzy of activity. The central scene—the evacuation of the last American forces from Saigon—was thrillingly designed by Rich Goss and lit by Tom Poss. Complete with a helicopter descending from the sky, the skillful execution allowed us to experience that heart-ravaging moment literally from both sides of the fence. 

Another layer is performative. Sung from beginning to end, Miss Saigon is full of leitmotifs that create strata of emotional experience as they reappear. 

“The music is extremely complex,” actor Vahn Phollurxa said. “It changes tempos all the time, it changes time signatures, … and it’s a lot of very intense emotion.” 

As the musical’s human landscape, the chorus of more than two dozen well-rehearsed dancers and singers brought hard-driving energy to the often-chaotic situations they had to navigate. The pit band, led by Jeremy Stevens, sometimes struggled with rhythmic clarity, which meant that some of Artistic Director Sara Phoenix’s crisp, dynamic choreography looked muddled.  

Local talents David Moreland, Jordan Debose, Sam Briggs and Hannah Finnegan held their own with professionals Nicole Barredo and Phollurxa in the challenging musical material. As Kim, Barredo’s subtle body language and confident, well-enunciated singing brought out steady power in Moreland’s unassuming Chris. Debose brought swagger and bite to the sleazy Engineer and unearthed rich depths beneath his character’s hard edge. Adept at projecting complex emotion with precision and vocal clarity, Briggs and Finnegan are two of Tulsa’s best. Phollurxa—who happens to be a child of refugees from the war—triumphed in some of the show’s toughest music and acting. As the Communist commissar Thuy, his incandescent rage and terror were perfectly controlled.

A third layer of complexity here is historical, cultural, political—the real-world-relevance layer. Miss Saigon is a product of Cold War cynicism, as seen in the Engineer’s bitterly ironic celebration of “The American Dream” just before the show’s shocking concluding scene. Novelist Robert Stone called the musical “a kind of European pop memory of the Vietnam War.” 

Combined with an aesthetic that demands maximal emotional thrust at all times, this perspective means there’s a good deal of distortion and cultural stereotyping in the depiction of the characters and their choices. It’s not surprising that there have been protests against the musical by the Vietnamese-American community in other cities.

But for Kopp, presenting Miss Saigon is a way to focus attention on our own reality. 

“As we’re winding down two wars in the Middle East, there are ripple effects that we have to deal with long after the war is over,” he said. “The real villain in this show is the war itself. And when it’s happening just a few feet away from you, in real time, in live theater—it’s a very different experience from just reading about it.”

For more from Alicia, read her article on New Genre Arts Festival XXII-B, which continues through Sept. 24.