War at 11
Miss Saigon still resonates.
The heat's been on, as the famous tagline says, since '89, but Miss Saigon only recently warmed up to regional theaters. The works still resonates, of course, since Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil — the composer and lyricist team behind Les Miserables — set Puccini's melodramatic Madama Butterfly in the Vietnam War's moral quagmire. Today's audiences know all about that sort of thing.
The first of many pleasant surprises in the Media Theatre's version is that it fits on its stage at all. Melissa Guyer's multilevel set features texture over slickness: Wooden panels slide to create different patterns upstage, framed by jungle thatching. Set changes are limited to furniture pieces (more than necessary, and moved unimaginatively), keeping the brisk flow achieved on Broadway through dozens of gliding platforms. Newsreel projections add little, but don't hurt. Jesse Cline's production thus focuses more on the music, the second surprise: Musical director Christopher Ertelt achieves a full orchestra sound with a small band, skillfully hitting the heights of Schönberg's bombastic Asian-themed score.
The tragic love story of Vietnamese innocent Kim (Michelle Liu Coughlin) and weary American G.I. Chris (Christopher deProphetis) builds appropriately, swept away by history, horns and surprise No. 3 — the huge helicopter, dramatically executed.
This production falters, however, in the simple matter of volume: Someone's decided that emotional power equals ear-blasting loudness, especially for Coughlin, who reveals the sweet sadness in "The Movie in My Mind" (along with Ester Barroso's Gigi) so well that she hardly needs pumping up to confront Viet Cong cousin Thuy (Anton Briones), or in other screech-prone face-offs. John Haggerty's shining moment as the wily Engineer proves the point: "The American Dream," sung directly to us, begins in a devious, confessional whisper, demonstrating the strength of subtlety and sincerity.
Ironically, some moments that might benefit from volume — particularly the Viet Cong's triumphant "The Morning of the Dragon," and the crowd's desperation at the embassy gates — don't get it, and come off rather wimpy (would AK-47 toting warriors really flip and tumble like gymnasts?).
Nevertheless, this Miss Saigon proves that it's not the size of your budget, but the creative use of your resources, that brings the heat.
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