My husband and I, together with my brother, watched the Asian production of Miss Saigon at the Theatres at the Solaire last Thursday. When I visited New York in 2018, the aunt and uncle of my co-worker treated us to a Broadway musical and Auntie kept on gushing how Miss Saigon was very impressive especially when they brought in a helicopter inside the theatre.

I realized, the story of Miss Saigon is a story that I didn’t want to happen to myself, but is still happening to many Filipinas today. The story of a prostituted young and naive girl of seventeen blindly falling in love with an American, bearing him a child and holding on to hope that he would come back and rescue them from the rat lives that they were living only to find him again but already married to an American.

I’ve also wondered, what do Vietnamese women think of Miss Saigon? If I told Nung, the owner of the home stay we stayed in in Hue about Miss Saigon, what would her reaction be? The stories of Kim, the prostituted women, the pimp, the comrade cousin, and the American G.I.s are true stories, I’m sure. They happened, but what happened after?

Anyways, art wise, I think the actresses playing Kim after Lea Salonga has a lot of pressure to make the character their own. I noticed in the show that the actor playing Kim had a louder microphone but some other actors, like Gigi, had a not-so-loud microphone, I can barely hear her voice. Or was that intentional? After all, Kim was Miss Saigon. The women were great actors but too sexualized (of course I understand they were prostitutes) but the fact that we are still applauding actors playing prostitutes and fighting to be saved by their customers made me uncomfortable.

There were several performances and effects that wowed me — like the act where Kim’s cousin appeared as a ghost and Kim had a flashback — wow, that must have been tiring for Kim. Some of the effects delighted me, including the helicopter scene (eventhough it was not a real helicopter), and I am glad to have visited Saigon before watching this play as it helped me picture out the places where some of the scenes happened.

Overall, I was glad I did not pay for the premium tickets and glad to have watched the show.