‘We’re rediscovering a show we know and love’: Inside the reborn musical Miss Saigon

It’s more than 35 years since the legendary Miss Saigon had its world premiere at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London’s West End. The Olivier and Tony Award-winning show has remained an enduring favourite with audiences ever since, seen by more than 38 million people worldwide. But this major new production touring the UK and Ireland marks an exciting, fresh chapter: it’s a brand-new invention of Miss Saigon, giving audiences a different experience of the timeless tale, and it is coming to British venues that it has never been able to visit before.

That combination proved an irresistible draw for the show’s original producer, Cameron Mackintosh, who has put together a new creative team with his fellow producer, Michael Harrison. The pair have joined forces with director Jean-Pierre van der Spuy, who previously directed Cameron’s production of Miss Saigon for the Australian Opera.

“For me, productions can never stay the same – they should always evolve,” says Mackintosh. “All great work can be reinterpreted. They need to reflect the era they are being performed in.” The show’s lighting designer, Bruno Poet, agrees, saying, “I’ve done new versions of Shakespeare plays and operas, and this feels comparable: we’re rediscovering a show we know and love.” Poet is collaborating closely with the Tony Award-winning video designer George Reeve, whose brilliant imagery plunges the audience back into the turbulent times of the 1970s, often using documentary footage from the period so that a modern audience can better understand the horrors of what people in Saigon went through in order to survive such a terrible conflict.

It’s been a big opportunity for van der Spuy to put his spin on this iconic musical. He admits he’s often pondered what he might do with the show but has relished the opportunity of working with choreographers Chrissie Cartwright and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille to put his ideas into practice and create something different.

The result has been a huge success with both audiences and critics, who have loved the starker and more personal new approach. However, Harrison explains that this isn’t a completely radical, minimalist overhaul either: it is still an epic Miss Saigon. The core elements remain, principally the heart-wrenching story, which sees 17-year-old local girl Kim fall in love with American GI Chris, only to be separated from him by the dramatic Fall of Saigon in 1975. “This is Miss Saigon told by a new creative team that have their own ideas for it,” says Harrison. “If you love Miss Saigon, you’re going to love this production. There is not a bigger show opening on the road.”

Indeed, the tour boasts an unusually large company: a cast of 28 actors and 13 musicians, as well as a technical team of 52 to assemble, run and move this production around the country. As Harrison explains: “None of us want to do anything that doesn’t go out there and create an impact. We want to do it to the highest level and be the best.” Mackintosh observes: “Claude-Michel Schönberg’s music has real muscle, which remains the beating heart of the musical – you would never want to diminish its soaring power and beauty.”

However, by making a purposeful shift from the operatic scale of the original Drury Lane production, the team has been able to home in on a key element of the work: the fact that it is rooted in real history. Although Miss Saigon’s doomed romance plot loosely matches that of Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, the major inspiration for Schönberg (who, with his lyricist partner Alain Boublil, also created historical epic Les Misérables) was a photograph he spotted in a magazine. It showed a Vietnamese mother saying a tearful farewell to her young daughter at the airport: she was sending her to the United States with her GI father, giving her the chance of a better life.

That unshakable sense of authenticity is what continues to make the show so deeply resonant, says Mackintosh. “It’s about a mother’s self-sacrifice, which is far beyond anything else, and a love story of young people torn apart by war. In particular, it shows the incredible bravery of these women, doing whatever they need to do to survive and protect their families. People believe in the characters: that’s why it breaks their hearts.”

The challenge with doing the show this time around “is to take audiences back to what it was really like in the 1970s,” says Mackintosh. “I’ve always taken great pride in that every note, every word in this show is based on reality – it’s an amalgam of true stories from the period. If it doesn’t feel real, it betrays the memories of these truly courageous people.”

Poet, who has also worked on previous productions of Miss Saigon, characterises this new version as having “a grittier tone: it places a real emphasis on the raw human story. It’s got more of an edge.” That is reflected in the design choices, he explains. “The last time I did Miss Saigon, it was more colourful. There are still amazing set-pieces, and of course, we deliver big moments like the helicopter leaving Saigon, but you’re also very aware of what’s lurking in the shadows.”

As part of their research, the design team referred to real photos of streets in Vietnam and Bangkok “to pick up on details of the different parts of these cities and how it feels to be there” says Poet. Likewise, set and costume designer Andrew D Edwards was interested in placing the action in the real location, “making sure you can feel the heat, that you can almost touch and smell and sense that country.”

Miss Saigon, notes Mackintosh, was a pioneering West End musical: “It is without doubt the biggest musical ever to feature Asian talent on this scale and a rare one that dealt with contemporary true events rather than period fiction.” Since its premiere, it has enjoyed enormous continual success in Asian countries too – it’s regularly performed in Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Singapore. That is a testament to its authenticity, argues Mackintosh: “It is their story. They possess it. They don’t consider it just another famous musical.”

Yet Miss Saigon is also extraordinarily transporting, notes Edwards, thanks to its soul-stirring music. Van der Spuy agrees: “That’s why all of us wanted to do it. It’s a truly great show with an incredible score, and it deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.” Mackintosh sums up: “I hope audiences walk out of the theatre thinking they have seen a brilliant musical for the first time, something really special, that feels current and not a revival – a legend reborn.’”

Miss Saigon runs at the Theatre Royal from Tuesday March 24 to Saturday April 4. Visit trch.co.uk or call 0115 989 5555 to book.