Miss Saigon - Sheffield Crucible

I think the culture has moved on from 'yes the themes are difficult but surely we sympathise most with Kim and condemn US actions' to 'when can we have South Asian / South East Asian characters who elicit more than sympathy?'. New Earth say in their statement that they understand the production is going for a 'new reading' of Miss Saigon, but they have to make decisions for their production and staff right now, and can't know in advance that they're going to be comfortable to be co-programmed with whatever the outcome is. I think they expressed that well - leaving space for the production to be revelatory, but frankly believing the problems they have with the material are too 'baked in'.

As a personal reaction, I've only seen the DVD of the live show. I felt incredibly uncomfortable thinking of the performers playing the Vietnamese women - how excited their families must be that they've made it to the West End, and then they're mainly involved in bump and grind routines. It's not wrong that this sex work is depicted, of course, but as actual people have to play these roles from within a relatively small community (and even smaller performing community) it's understandable many want what's next rather than what's already been. Will be interesting to see how the reinterpretation goes.

I was enjoying the recent 'South Pacific', then realised we hadn't had 'Happy Talk' yet, and that could torpedo the whole thing. As it turned out, the song's re-orchestration brought a complexity and mordant tone that absolutely brought a three-dimensional character angle to Bloody Mary. So Joanna Ampil has experience of reinterpreting roles to have more complexity. It can certainly be argued anyway that the (male) Engineer can be played Emcee-like, almost savouring the madness around him satirically and sundering his own morality as part of that. I wonder if playing it female may make that more difficult, as the relationship to 'the girls' and womanhood will be different; perhaps they have an entirely different angle in mind.  

How much of an original you can pull in a new direction, confound, interrogate, rug-pull and critique, before you break what fundamentally worked will be interesting to see.  

I don't think New Earth will have a problem programming the planned work elsewhere, so I don't think anything's been lost.  In recent years they've had work at Theatre Royal Plymouth, the Arcola in London and many other venues.   

I do usually roll my eyes when the argument comes up with musicals: 'Why X revival, when we could have New Writing?'  Why? Because people go and see known properties, and a hit show might cross-subsidise New Writing.  In this case though, from a subsidised theatre, and so soon after the commercial West End revival, it does feel to me that the talents of Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau might have jumped to a Large Scale piece of New Writing and cut out the middle man.  It's time.

Hello, not a man and still in this discussion. The club scene is an uncomfortable watch and that's deliberate. They are selling sex, how else would you stage it? Miss Saigon is far from the only show to have girls gyrating in skimpy costumes.