This first-ever guest blog on Fresh! is sponsored by the number nine. Nine is the number of consecutive nights I’ve spent sleeping in a bed other than my own. Nine is the number of times I’ve been to downtown Chicago since graduating from high school about five years ago. And, as of Thursday night, nine is the number of times I’ve seen Miss Saigon live in the theater.
Miss Saigon opened on Broadway during the 1991 theater season, and the first national touring production opened in Chicago in 1992. I saw Miss Saigon twice during that initial Chicago run, which lasted several months, and I’ve seen the show since in New York, London, Minneapolis, Des Moines, and now twice more in Chicago. Well, after ten years, Miss Saigon has already closed in London, and it is scheduled to close in New York on New Year’s Eve, so this may have been my last chance ever to experience the show.
To add some useful wisdom to Fresh! for today, I’ve decided to include my Top Nine observations about Miss Saigon for anyone who may have the opportunity to catch the show before it closes…
9. One of the best moments in the show is when the Engineer says, “Welcome to Dreamland,” and the dressing room breaks apart to reveal the bar scene moving up to the front of the stage.
8. One of the best moments in the show is when Chris and Kim are making out at the end of “The Last Night of the World,” and their room breaks into three pieces — one piece goes off to the left, one piece goes off to the right, and the porch (where they’re making out) goes straight back upstage.
7. No matter how many times you see it, the helicopter is still pretty damn cool.
6. The entire Fall of Saigon sequence, where you’re continually on different sides of the embassy fence, is even better than the helicopter itself.
5. Perhaps it’s because the spotlight operators were slow on Thursday night, but for the first time, I noticed that whenever the Engineer appears on stage during the first act, there are two spotlights on him; one is a normal round spotlight, and it obscures another spotlight shaped like a star, which also hits the actor. It’s that whole American Dream thing.
4. Chris, the American G.I., is cast on a quotient of looks to singing ability. There’s a finite number involved in the quotient, and the higher the looks, the lower the singing ability. Honest to God. I’ve seen something like six different actors play Chris, and if I ranked them in order of looks and then in order of actual singing voice and intonation, the two lists would be exact mirrors of each other. Let’s just say that the guy I saw in Chicago was really good-looking.
3. “The American Dream” proves that a great song with great lyrics can be a great moment when performed by a great Engineer.
2. Despite what many people say, Miss Saigon is a great piece of theater, with wonderful music and a very sincere love story which serves as a metaphor for some of the mistakes we made as Americans during the Vietnam War. And Chris’s climactic line, “Christ, I’m an American. How could I fail to do good?” is much more effective now that they’ve decided not to have him pick up and slam down the wicker couch in the hotel room, which always skidded a few feet downstage in a most unintentionally comic way.
1. I always wanted to play Chris. But now the show is closing. Maybe I’ll get to conduct it sometime in a high school, community, or college production. I know that I’ll miss Saigon…
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