Miss Saigon — Sheffield Crucible revives a problematic musical

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After almost 35 years of productions, each shoring up its status as one of the all-time highest-grossing musicals, Miss Saigon is having to prove itself again. It’s become the flashpoint for controversy surrounding south-east Asian representation, with its story of a villager who is seduced, and ultimately abandoned, by an American soldier during the Vietnam War. Kimber Lee’s recent satire skinned it down to these stereotypes, while New Earth Theatre — a company of British east and south-east Asian artists — protested by pulling their show, Worth, from the Sheffield Crucible altogether.

Rob Hastie and Anthony Lau’s production goes some way to scrubbing it clean. It starts with Ben Stones’ design, which jettisons eastern iconography for steel bars and grating, as though the GIs’ dog tags have been melded together. The astuteness of this militaristic metal wrap reminds us of the dual tethering to the army and the struggle for freedom. Vietnamese villager Kim is haunted by her relationship with soldier Chris, just as he is desperate to escape the burden and machismo of the GIs.

Jessica Lee convincingly portrays the child plucked from the cornfields who learned to adapt. A diminutive figure, she modulates between guileless sweetness and an inner scalding ferocity. She tries to be tough and straight-backed, only going limp at the revelation of Chris’s American wife.

As Chris, Christian Maynard slips into boyish warbles that echo her girlish soprano trills. In “The Confrontation”, he subtly shows he hasn’t let her go, mirroring her posture, rooted to the floor with clenched fists and strained face as he roars out.

Video designer Andrzej Goulding’s projections of static suggest dissolving dreams. Jessica Hung Han Yun’s crepuscular lighting reflects the smog of Saigon and an illusory quality to Kim’s aspirations. The colours and neon of the club always fade away to reveal that dull metal and greyscale reality, as in “The Movie in My Mind”.

The Engineer, played by Joanna Ampil, shows this pull of America taken to extreme, with the torrent of excess in the song “The American Dream”. Ampil conveys how the character’s name is more than a euphemism for the pimp, manipulating and manufacturing fortunes. Her martinet aggression and stentorian barking also capture how it sounds like a military rank.

For all Hastie and Lau’s effort to airbrush the story, it remains intrinsically problematic. The US-centrism and the Vietnamese women’s total dependence on the soldiers are hard-wired into the plot and lyrics. Their prospects lie solely in surrendering themselves as brides to secure passage to America. Kim, in particular, is the subject of a tug of war and her life is locked in a standstill that only Chris can liberate. Lee shows Kim’s lack of agency through rigid movements, arms by her sides, but her stoniness makes her inaccessibly removed and lacking chemistry with Maynard’s Chris.

It’s also clunkily structured, jerking through bitty scenes and time-jumps without stitching them into a fluid narrative. The production’s loudness and messiness don’t help. The cast give full-bodied renditions of a ballad-heavy score, the songs swelling in similar crescendos. Hastie and Lau also overload spectacle that’s technically stunning, but no less bewildering. The helicopter sequence encapsulates how this production gives blasts of air, but when they die down, nothing has ultimately changed for Miss Saigon.

★★★☆☆

To August 19, sheffieldtheatres.co.uk