Oh Miss Saigon, you’re a tragedy from the first line.

So, yesterday – after seeing Sleeping Beauty the day before – I was out at Browns Hotel for afternoon tea with family and then we decided to see if we could buy last minute tickets to Miss Saigon.

I have been dying to see it since it first came back to the Westend (which was ages ago) and I just never got around to it. Then of course, I discovered that it was leaving the Westend in Feb and panicked.

I wasn’t missing it. Not when I was convinced there was a helicopter that was supposed to land on stage. I WANT TO SEE A HELICOPTER!

I wont go into detail about the afternoon tea this time. Browns is my favourite for tea just because I love the relaxed atmosphere of that hotel – great place to just sit and chill or get some work done, even if you just want to stop in for a cup of tea rather then the full works.

Onwards: theatre. Prince Edward’s Theatre near Leicester Square, home of the Vietnam War.

Well, a bit of it at least.

(Contains Spoilers From Here On Out)

A short summary, it follows Kim, a young girl from the country-side who’s family were killed when their village was attacked. Arriving in the city, she’s offered a job by a character called The Engineer – a pimp who runs a club called Dreamland.

There she meets Chris, an American GI on his last few nights in Saigon before he and the other troops get called home.

Chris’s friend, John, buys him Kim for one night and that night together begins the spiral down into sorrow.

Though not before the pair fall into a passionate, near-hypnotic love, finding what they need in the other. In Chris, Kim finds a man who is kind and caring and willing to take her away from the Hell she has been hurled into. In Kim, Chris finds a young woman who he can actually protect, a way to ground and focus himself in a war that doesn’t make sense.

After their first night, they agree to meet again. Chris buys her from the Engineer with the intention to take her back with him to America. He just needs to sort out the papers, get back and collect her within the 48 hours he has left.

He promises to come back for her. They even go through a ceremony similar to a wedding (though it takes Chris by surprise). During the ceremony however, a man from Kim’s past shows up. Thuy was Kim’s betrothed – a marriage arranged by their fathers when they were young. Though she does not love him, Thuy tracked her down with the intention of marriage to honour their fathers’ last wishes.

Chris drives Thuy away and everything finally seems to be ready and set. Chris will collect her papers, come back and they’ll leave for The States together.

Everything should go to plan.

But Chris never comes back for her.

Three years pass and in that time, the Americans have been driven out and Vietnam is fighting to rebuild itself under new rule.

Now I don’t know a lot about this part of history – though after watching this musical, I’m a lot more interested in learning about it. What I can gather though is that life is HARD. Life is always hard when a country is trying to return from the ruins of war. Hundreds of people are fleeing the country to America, praying for a better life in the Land of The Free.

Meanwhile Thuy has become an officer in the Vietnamese army and he has captured The Engineer. His intention? Find Kim and bring her back.

Sneaky man that he is, Engineer tracks her down in no time. Kim has been living in poverty for the last three years, surviving as well as she can, like everyone else. She still has faith in Chris and that he will one day return for her.

Sadly – what we know and what she doesn’t – is that Chris, in the three years that have past, has married and moved on with his life. Well, moved on as best he can, though he is still hounded by night-terrors of the war and the girl he left behind.

Thuy comes for Kim, insisting they marry as they should have but she refuses. She cannot because she is married to another man. And, not only that, she has a son.

A mixed race child of an American – a disgrace to Vietnam. The only thing Thuy can do, for his honour and reputation, is kill little Tam.

This intention results in his own death however. Kim shoots and kills him to protect her child and this leaves her now a fugitive.

Her only escape is to get out of Vietnam. Along with the Engineer (posing as her brother) – using the son of an American as their ticket out – the trio leave for Bangkok.

Act 2

Meanwhile, back in American – John, (Chris’s GI friend), plagued by guilt when he sees the hundreds of fatherless children left behind, has set up a foundation to help care for these lost souls of the war.

Through this, he discovers the whereabouts of Kim (Who Chris has been searching for) and also that there is a son. He decides to tell Chris but such news will throw Chris’s life into turmoil. He never told his wife about what happened in Saigon. He can only come clean to her and the trio make the trip to Bangkok to find Kim and Tam.

Kim meanwhile is working in another nightclub, the Engineer a sub-pimp for a wretched boss we all dislike. John approaches Kim first, telling her that Chris is in the city to see her but he doesn’t mention Ellen, The Other Wife.

~~~

It is in this act that we finally discover why Chris never returned for Kim. Originally, he planned to take 48 hours to sort things out and collect her, leaving her his gun as a promise that he would return. Once he is back in the embassy, he discovers he only has 24 hours and before he can leave, the gates are closed. No one is allowed in, no one is allowed out.

John refuses to let him go – scared that Chris wont make it back in time and will be abandoned in Saigon while the Americans flee.

Kim, fearing for him because Chris is late, goes to the embassy to try and find him and isn’t home to pick up the phone to speak to Chris when he tries to call to explain what’s happenings.

As more and more times passes, Chris becomes desperate, trying to escape until John finally threatens to shoot him sooner then let him out. The final helicopter arrives for the last of the GIs. Chris is forced on, flying over the citizens of Saigon who are still clamouring at the gates, trying to spot Kim in the crowd until it is finally too late. The helicopter takes off and he’s gone for good.

(There really was a helicopter on stage! I was so excited by this one prop lol)

~~~~

After this flashback, while John goes to fetch Chris, the Engineer sends Kim to his hotel, hoping that when they see each other, their passion will rekindle again and that will get them to America for good. Only Chris is gone and Ellen is there.

Of course, both are shocked and horrified to learn that the other is the wife and Kim is forced to make a terrible request. She asks Ellen to take Tam to America and give him the life he deserves. Ellen refuses. Kim is his mother, they can’t be parted, and she and Chris want children of their own. Devastated, Kim leaves, once again missing Chris when he returns soon after.

The news that Kim was there and that she wants to give up Tam is too much for him. He is unwilling to unbalance his life and marriage. When John tries to reason with them, Chris and Ellen decide that they will not take Tam from Kim. They will leave them in Bangkok but support them with whatever they can from America.

Fear and desperation means they will not listen to reason from John. Kim is a smart girl, she will understand, as Chris says.

Defeated, John goes with the couple to the club to meet Kim, Tam and the Engineer, to work through the details of the plan.

Kim, now dressed in the gown she married in, prepares Tam to meet his father and chooses to send him out alone first, so they can meet without her.

While everyone else is outside, talking and greeting Tam, Kim slips away into hiding, takes the gun Chris left her all those years ago, and shoots herself.

Chris is the one to find her, barely alive from the wound to her stomach. With that final act, she forces Chris to take Tam and give him the life she wanted for him. After all, Kim is a smart girl and she probably knew they would never take Tam so long as she was still alive.

She passes away in Chris’s arms as he screams over her body.

Summary Ending

Ok, I admit, not a short summary but there’s a lot going on!

So, I’ve only ever cried at one musical before this, which was Blood Brothers, but this got the tears going because of the all-out unfairness of the whole thing.

The characters are not based on real people, not people who can be looked up and historically traced… and yet in a way they can. Because their story was not a unique one.

It was just one of many stories of young women, forced into surviving any way they can in the terrors of war, fighting for a better life and an escape from the ever present threat of murder.

It’s one of many stories of men who fell into desperate relationships with girls to try and find some stability and sanity in a war that no one truly understood before fleeing the country when they were defeated.

And it’s the story of children born into a world no one would want to bring a child into – with a mix of blood no one wants to exist because of what it means to both sides.

So while Chris, Kim and Tam – and John, Ellen and Engineer – never existed, the fact that other people like them did adds a very heavy layer to the show. Also, it’s based on an era of history that is still in living memory.

Les Mis for example, though based on a real event, no one remembers it so it changes the dynamics of how people react to it. With Miss Saigon, there are whole generations who remember it. Who saw it on the news and, more then that, who lived through it.

And the characters all have lights and shades to them – which I loved. Asides from Kim, they were not all always likeable. Even Kim had her dodgy moments but I would side with her because she was our tragedy hero.

For example, Chris, our own love interest, a wonderful, kind man at the beginning, we struggle with at the end because of how he handles the reality of having a son. Listening to comments while we were filtering out of the theatre, people didn’t like him for it. It’s understandable. We want happy endings. We want the young lovers to make it and be together as a family. But we have to look at the situation Chris is in. We know that when he returned to America, he was a broken man and it took him a year before he was willing to venture into the world again, only rejoining it because of Ellen.

Abandoning Kim ruined him – how willing will a man, suffering from extreme PTSD, be to drag up that part of his past? And how can he fit a child like that into his Golden American life? We know that the children born of that war suffered greatly because they weren’t accepted by either of their home countries.

So while this doesn’t make him an entirely likeable character by the end, it makes him real.

And his wife. The situation she is faced with is beyond the realm of the norm. She is so understanding and kind to Kim and Chris – which makes her likeable. Yet she’s not willing to take Kim’s child. She almost insinuates that Kim’s child is less important then any child she will have because she is the Wife Now – which is hard to swallow.

And the Engineer. Our wonderful comic relief and such a tragic figure in his own right. He, like so many others, believe America to be The Land of The Free. It will be the place where he can swim in money, own fantastic nightclubs, live a life unlike anything he would get back Saigon. And perhaps, if he ever got there, he would have made it – he was a savvy businessman after all. But it’s that blind belief that makes your heart bleed for him because there is such a dark unknown for people like him.

Kim herself breaks my heart. A seventeen year old girl forced to grow up very quickly – as so many were (and are) – and in doing so, she comes to understand the way people work. She knows how to get Tam the life he needs and nothing will stop her providing for him. And there is of course that question, what life is out there for her? She should have lived out in the paddy fields as a rice farmer, following in the footsteps of her ancestors. Now her life is one of sex and alcohol. The man she is married to is married to someone else. The man she was promised to is dead by her hand and his ghost haunts her still. Her country and home can never be returned to. She cannot go to America. What is left?

Of course, I’ve gone through all this and I haven’t even talked about the music in the musical. It was, of course, fantastic. A lot of the songs I already knew, one of the reasons I wanted to see it so badly. Songs like ‘Movie in My Mind’ ‘Why, God, Why?’ ‘Last Night of The World’ and sooooo many more, all wonderful, heartbreaking songs that hammer home the darkness of the story.

The singers were incredible. Powerful and emotional. I believe the lead who played Kim is to go on to play in Les Mis after this (taking over from Carrie Hope Fletcher) and she will undoubtedly do a wonderful job, just like she does in Miss Saigon.

I didn’t realise that it was a musical that was entiiirely sung (like barely any actual spoken lines in it) and I usually don’t hugely like those styles of musicals but for this one, I can make an exception.

All in all, a powerful, heart-warming, heart-wrenching musical that will be surely missed when it finally comes off the circuit this year.

There is still time however!

It is not yet finished! We have until February before it leaves us for Broadway. Grab tickets while you can because who knows how long it’ll be until it returns and we get to see a helicopter with spinning blades and high winds land and take off on stage. (Yes, I know, I’m slightly obsessed with the helicopter, leave it alone.)

Catch it while you can. It is SO worth your while to see one of the greats. Link below to the website.

Laugh, cry, get angry and enjoy!

http://www.miss-saigon.com/box-office/