Dream Turned Nightmare

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

MISS SAIGON

Music by Claude-Michel Schonberg

Lyrics by Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr.

The last helicopter lifts off from the U.S. embassy roof and sways, almost tauntingly, in midair. The blast from its rotors flutters the now useless documents of the South Vietnamese, crushed against the gates, who were promised escape but are being left behind. Imbued by the occupying forces with the American Dream, they are abandoned to a nightmare retribution. That harrowing image from the newsreel of the mind not only inspired London's biggest new musical but is actually re-created onstage. While special effects generally promote escapism rather than emotion, the scenes of the hasty and haphazardly callous U.S. retreat from Saigon reduced many in last week's opening-night audience to tears.

They were weeping because literature had done what it does best: define a catastrophe in human terms, at the primal level of the G.I. helpless within the compound and the woman he pledged to marry trapped outside. Miss Saigon, from the creators of Les Miserables, is too long and wayward, unevenly acted and loaded with cliches. But the failings hardly matter because the show takes on a powerful subject, explores it without easy answers and ends in true tragedy -- disaster wrought by those who meant only to help.

The central romance, like the political backdrop, is a rescue fantasy. Soldier Chris (Simon Bowman) meets Kim (Lea Salonga), a village girl turned prostitute, and seeks to save her from that servitude, then from the wrath of a cousin to whom she was betrothed in childhood. At last, impulsively, he vows to save her from the coming chaos. His heart is good, but his head is clouded: he has no thought for the practical realities of her future in an alien land, only for the sweet moment of his own chivalry. Even that fails. In this revamping of Madama Butterfly, Chris cannot get to Kim before heading home.

Within a year he marries, not knowing that Kim has escaped to Bangkok -- and borne him a son. Then a veterans' group puts him in contact with his Vietnamese family. Chris comes to Thailand, meaning to meet his responsibilities, instead completing Kim's psychic destruction. Her last desperate act is to ensure her son's future at the cost of her own. The primacy of love over money, the tale implies, is evident only to those who can be sure of both.

Musically, the Les Miz team here provides something subtler, less lushly melodramatic. Bowman and Claire Moore as his wife make the best of thankless parts, although his pitch and accent wobble while she sings gloriously. Jonathan Pryce is deliciously campy yet sympathetic as the Engineer, a Eurasian pimp evocative of the emcee in Cabaret. In Salonga, a star is born. Playing a plaster saint, she is stunningly real. But the show's final moments are so bleak that despite an $8 million advance, its future may not be assured. Some downers, like Les Miz, are at heart ups. This one is only a down.