Why Are We in Miss Saigon?

Bombast and cynicism, helicoptered in.

- Jesse Green

YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW whether you like Miss Saigon, the pop-opera retread of Madama Butterfly set against the collapse of the American experiment in Vietnam. If you do like it, by all means see the revival that opened on Broadway in late March; it won’t disappoint. If you don’t, come sit by me.

I needn’t rehash at length the controversy that surrounded the original production, which premiered in London in 1989 before arriving in New York, also at the Broadway Theatre, in 1991. The yellow face casting of Jonathan Pryce, a white actor, as the Engineer, a Eurasian pimp who serves as the story’s cynical emcee, led to protests, an Equity ban, an Equity reversal, and, eventually, a tradition in which the character is now always played by an actor of Asian descent. Currently, it’s Jon Jon Briones, who is Filipino; he’s prodigiously oily where Pryce was subtly unhinged.

But Miss Saigon has another, more pervasive sensitivity problem, one that is conceivably even worse than Madama Butterfly’s even though it was written eight decades later. I refer to the Orientalist conception of the work regardless of casting. (There were protests about this in 1991 as well.) Like