Miss Saigon

This past weekend, along with a handful of friends, I attended my second ever musical (well... more on that shortly). We saw a matinée performance of Miss Saigon, a show at least a couple of my friends have unequivocally labelled as a favourite. (I will not include spoilers in this review, though I will reference the mood/genre of the piece.)

Miss Saigon is considered a musical, though the phrase "technically an operetta" came up in our discussion of it. After some time on Wikipedia, I'm willing to retract my support for that statement, but not the intent behind it: like, say, Repo or Les Mis, Miss Saigon is entirely sung (excluding dramatic spoken lines, which clearly formed part of songs). Musicals like Wicked also feature an amount of play-like, spoken word expository scenes, augmented by song (and occasionally dance) numbers. Miss Saigon, while it had the kind of involved choreography that seems typical for musicals over operettas (and probably lacked many performers with operatic singing backgrounds, though I'm only guessing inexpertly here), was entirely composed of sung scenes.

I will admit at this stage my significant preference for musicals with unsung exposition. I don't feel they are in any way superior, but I am personally more fond of them. I feel like they give me a better insight into the characters, let me see more depth and story, compared to the medium of song, but that may be due to my limited perception of song. This almost certainly factored into my final opinion, which can mostly be summarised as "unimpressed". The piece is meant to portray a tragic love story and I just didn't feel involved enough with the characters to care enough (my inbuilt excess of cynicism probably didn't help overmuch).

Obviously, this is the only time I've seen this show, but a couple of things have made me wonder if perhaps my issues here are not with the source material (or at least not entirely). The vast majority of the show and character did in fact seem to be part of a tragic love story production. Unlike some of the friends I attended with, I thought the performances of what I would consider the lead roles in the story were quite good (maybe not mindblowing, but certainly beautiful and carrying across the right emotion - perhaps my threshold is lower). That kind of mood, however, is fragile, much like horror in a tabletop setting: all it takes is one person laughing to break the mood and remind everyone they're sitting in a room rolling dice and being silly. Most of the characters, most of the music/dance numbers supported this: even the bordello scene at the beginning, which by necessity had to be cheerful had an undercurrent of despair only fortified by "Movie in my Mind". The Engineer, however, seemed to have other ideas. He was a character that seemed to have been plucked from a satirical, humorous musical and plopped in here, in the midst of strife and heartwrenching decisions. (I'm looking at you, "If You Want to Die in Bed" and "The American Dream".)

And the thing is... I can see those songs having that undercurrent of despair, that feeling of laughing to stop yourself from crying and falling apart, the defense mechanism from insanity... But this Engineer didn't bring that to them, for me. And worse yet, I don't think I was the only one to focus on him (and the mood he brought) over the rest. A few of my companions picked him out as the highlight of the show and, in the final applause order, he was last, over all the participants in the tragic love story that was supposedly central to the plot.

So... yeah. He was fun and I'll probably still hum "If You Want to Die in Bed" today because it's catchy, but I think its rendition (and the character's as a whole) may have heavily impacted the perceived quality of the musical as a whole, at least for me.

Still... I'm not sure I would see it again to check that theory.