MISS SAIGON THE LEGEND REBORN | UK IRELAND TOUR @ EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE
★★★★★
“An intense, exhilarating new take on an old favourite…”
If there’s a movie in your mind playing a previous production of Boublil and Schönberg’s war-torn love story right now, turn it off, Miss Saigon: The Legend Reborn, Michael Harrison’s bold new reimagining of the award-winning musical is an exciting piece of storytelling in the popular Broadway style.
Fast paced, taut and lean, it allows the score, lyrics and performances to tell the story of Kim and Chris without the encumbrance of grandiose, spell-breaking scene changes that break the spell.
Their unlikely romance unfolds in the shadows and spotlights of Andrew D Edwards’ set design, which is brought alive by Bruno Poet’s riveting lighting design and George Reeve’s ominous projections. Their efforts combine to create an intimate world of love and loss amid the horrors of war, in which director Jean-Pierre Van Der Spuy deftly manoeuvres his cast.
Based on Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, Miss Saigon, like its predecessor, follows the doomed romance of an Asian woman and visiting member of the American forces – in this case, young Vietnamese bar girl, Kim, and conscientious GI, Chris. In 1975, in Saigon, as the last days of the Vietnam War unfold, 17 year-old Kim, forced to work in a bar run by the notorious Engineer, meets and falls in love with Chris, only for them to be torn apart by the fall of Saigon.
After a three year search for Chris, who has no idea he’s fathered a son, Kim finds herself back in Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, where she is reunited with The Engineer. Together, they set sail for America, she in the hope of finding the love of her life, The Engineer in search of the great American dream. A quest that brings them to Bangkok where fate has one last hand to play.
In an age when the casting pool is growing ever wider due to the dominance of social media and reality TV, both Julianne Pundan as Kim and Jack Kane as Chris are real finds. Making her professional debut, Pundan, never over-awed by the demands of the role facing here, sings it beautifully, with real emotion, anger and gritty determination. Kane, an actor/singer and multi-instrumentalist with more than six million streaming credits, brings an ‘everyman’ edge to Chris thanks to a natural acting style and the raw, powerful quality of his vocals.
There is little doubt, however, that the star of the production is Seann Miley Moore who, as The Engineer, drives the performance forward with a fierce performance that is as scurrilous as it is fey but all the time resists the temptation to overplay a role that so easily lends itself to melodrama. With a nice line in sass, he also manages to charm the audience into moments of audience participation.
Good support also comes from Emily Langham as Ellen and Miko Juan as Thuy who are each solid in their roles, while a well drilled ensemble brings Chrissie Cartwright and Carrie-Ann Ingrouille’s regimented choreography to life with hawkish precision.
Practically sung through, highlights of this production include Pundan and Kane’s exhilarating rendition of The Last Night of The World, Langham’s heart-breaking rendition of Maybe, and if Moore’s The American Dream seems initially stripped back, by the end it proves every bit the rabble-rouser expected, even without the symbolic Cadillac Convertible of old… although whispers are it may return.
With the restructured narrative including a few surprises, not least the fact that the evacuation of Saigon is now told in flashback, multimedia aspects of the staging allow the full terror of the fall of Saigon to hit home more effectively, enhanced by the thundering sound design of Adam Fisher.
Consequently, Miss Saigon: The Legend Reborn is an intense, exhilarating new take on an old favourite that, by the final curtain, proves as emotionally devastating as ever.
Full tour details and tickets here.
