playbill vip

Notes from the Director

Miss Saigon takes place in Saigon, Vietnam (now known as Ho Chi Minh City) at the tail end of the Vietnam War, and then continues the story three years later. Kim, a young, struggling Vietnamese refugee, meets Chris, an American Marine stationed in Vietnam. The two fall in love and pledge to marry, but war tears them apart. The rest of the story follows their lives both together and apart three years later.  Based on Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, this is an intensely personal story of the losses we suffer and the sacrifices we make in a world gone mad.  And so it is that this show finds a way to touch almost everyone.  We have young love, the impoverished promised a better life, people seeking freedom, a mother's devotion to her child ... not to mention the fact that the backdrop of the show is the final days of the Vietnam War.  So many people, me included, have had their lives impacted by that time in history.

I recall the day that the draft numbers were posted for the young men who were my older brother's age. How I prayed that his number would be a high enough number that he would not be drafted into this world of the Vietnam War.  His number is still etched into my mind today, number 253.  I was young at that time and still in high school and I strongly remember that I didn't want my brother to taste the bitterness of seeing and being placed into that part of life that so many great men have had to endure whether by their own choice or by the choice of a lottery system.

The first time I saw Miss Saigon was on Oahu when the National Tour presented it at the Blaisdell Theater.  I walked away from that performance totally overwhelmed from what I had just witnessed.  At that time, the seed of desire was planted to one day be a part of sharing this story.  I have found that Miss Saigon is an experience that is hard not to emotionally get invested in these characters. We have been blessed to have cast some amazing actors and singers who really make them become alive and very real. The creators of Miss Saigon crafted these characters through thorough research and interviews.  The leads are extremely complex and each goes through major transformation through the course of the show. We have spent a lot of time discussing the motivations behind their choices and reasons they react to others the way they do, in an effort to make them as believable as possible.  Miss Saigon’s score rivals Les Misérables in its ability to evoke an emotional response from the audience. 

In conclusion, whether justified or not, war is still a reality-- always messy and with cruel consequences.  Those who forget history are bound to repeat it.  Sometimes it’s up to the arts to remind us of the truth. There are feel-good musicals that leave theatergoers with a foot-tapping, care-free kind of sentiment.  And then there are rarer pieces, which leave viewers pensive, perhaps saddened, and maybe even a little bit shocked by what they’ve witnessed.  Miss Saigon leans toward this end of the scale but still has the ability to open one's heart and change the world for good.  It is our honor to endeavor toward those ends.