Miss Saigon: 25th Anniversary Performance

1975, just before the fall of Saigon. A young Vietnamese woman called Kim meets an American soldier, Chris, at her job in a bar. The city is evacuated; Chris leaves by helicopter and Kim is left behind. Years later there is a child and a choice. Brett Sullivan directs. This is a stage recording: the twenty fifth anniversary performance at the Prince Edward Theatre in London, filmed and shown in cinemas. The music is by Claude-Michel Schönberg, the lyrics by Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr. The source is Puccini's Madama Butterfly, the story moved to the Vietnam war. Eva Noblezada plays Kim; the performance made her known and she later played the part on Broadway. Jon Jon Briones is the Engineer. The most discussed passage is the finale. After the applause the original cast comes on, Lea Salonga, who created the role in 1989, among them. The known scene is the helicopter; the evacuation of Saigon is staged with theatre machinery and is the most cited moment in the musical. The politics of the work are contested. The construction of the Asian woman as victim and the western point of view have been criticised for years, and this recording does not change the text. Who it is for: musical theatre audiences and anyone interested in the filmed performance format. Who it is not for: it is not a film, the camera language is limited, and the representational problems of the story stand as they are.