THEATER

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

On the night that Les Miserables opened in London in October 1985, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg asked their producer, Cameron Mackintosh, if they now had an assured career in the theater. When he said yes, the two French creators told the impresario they had a new project: they wanted to update the Madama Butterfly story. This time their inspiration was not a 1,000-page Victor Hugo novel but a single news photograph of a Vietnamese mother and daughter parting at an airport. The mother had raised her child with one goal: to locate the girl's father, an American soldier who had returned to the U.S., then send the child off to join him in a life of opportunity in a land the mother would never see. The musical would tell of such a mother, begin in the waning days of the U.S. presence in Vietnam and be called Miss Saigon.

The idea evolved into the most anticipated show in U.S. stage history. Its first phase, a two-record "concept album," turned out to be unreleasable because it unwisely sounded just like Les Miz and had to be junked at a cost of $500,000. But the show was radically revamped and opened on stage in London, where it remains the town's hottest ticket. On its way to Broadway, it ran afoul of the performers' union, Actors' Equity, and assorted ethnic lobbying groups. Charges that Mackintosh had not sought out enough Asian Americans escalated into a probe of racial hiring practices on all his shows; at one point he canceled the Broadway engagement in disgust and, he now reveals, reverted Miss Saigon's rights to its authors. The battles ended, as everyone always predicted, with Broadway making way for a much needed hit.

The first really healthy musical of the 11-month-old season, Miss Saigon will open next week already holding cash and commitments for a record $36 million in tickets -- about double the tally of the former champion, The Phantom of the Opera. It seems set to pay off its production cost of $10 million, also a record, by the turn of the year. In an era when many musicals run a year or two without repaying a cent of their investment, Mackintosh aims to show a profit after 36 weeks, a timetable he accomplished with Miss Saigon in London. Such claims of financial wizardry might be suspect from almost anyone else but this disarmingly frank and casual ex-stagehand. A keen intellect with a common touch, he presented four of the foremost international hits of the '80s, Cats, Phantom, Les Miz and Little Shop of Horrors, and is regarded as the world's nonpareil producer.

Even for Mackintosh, mounting a musical about Vietnam that recalls both the agony of defeat and the shame of abandonment -- and that ends in thwarted love and suicide -- seemed a risky business. Suppressing an impulse to premiere the show directly on Broadway, something he had never done, Mackintosh tried Miss Saigon in the West End, where theatergoing is a steadier habit and Vietnam guilt is not a local concern. He then relied on word of mouth among U.S. tourists to build up a buzz. By now it is a crescendo, enough to let him catapult Broadway's top single-show price to $100, a level previously limited to scalpers, for each of 250 front mezzanine seats, and to $60 for nearly all the rest.

For that sum, theatergoers get the patented English-musical mix of romance and melodrama, soliloquy and strife, all bound up in an unsurpassed spectacle. Seen through the eyes of two Vietnamese characters -- a pimp and hustler of irredeemable cynicism called the Engineer (Jonathan Pryce) and a woman of unquenchable faith and optimism called Kim (Lea Salonga) -- the narrative fuses a crude soap-opera plot with subtle satire of relations between capitalism and the Third World. Big in cast (45), emotion and physical sweep, the story ranges from the neon vice bars of Saigon and Bangkok to the red- bannered propaganda parades and squalid re-education camps of the Hanoi regime. It embraces chaste Asian weddings and bawdy Yankee beauty contests, a crooning anthem to a glistening American automobile and an austere hymn to a mammoth statue of Ho Chi Minh.

In the show's climactic flashback and visual signature, audiences relive a humiliating moment from the nightly newscasts of April 1975: the last U.S. helicopter to leave hovers just above the embassy in Saigon, its rotors whirring and its engine aroar, while behind a barred gate a throng of dependents, informers, helpers and hangers-on howl to be rescued. Among them is the title character, Kim, a peasant virgin turned bar girl turned soldier's wife-to-be, forlornly waving the now useless paper that says she is entitled to join the soldier far away. That moment shapes Kim's life and drives the story toward its tragic reunion. When at last she sees the father of her toddler son, he is married to another woman. In a desperate moment, Kim does the only thing she can think of to force the father to take his son to the U.S. With her suicide, a story that has been passionate and thrilling turns doom struck, and the hope for which she gives up everything is deliberately left hanging. As she dies, the person holding and comforting the child is not the father nor his new wife nor an American friend on the scene but the Engineer, who has viewed the boy chiefly as a human passport to the paradise of American prosperity. Says Mackintosh: "The audience has to leave not knowing what will happen to the child. That is the truth of the world we live in."

Dramatically, Kim's lover Chris, his wife Ellen and his friend John are much less important than the Vietnamese, and the action is largely confined to Asia. The play's real subject is what "they" -- Third World people, Asian people -- think of the basically Western "us" that is presupposed to be the audience. To make Kim and the Engineer vivid when they reveal almost nothing of themselves except their fantasies of these distant others requires skillful acting and incandescent star quality. The London production had both, and Mackintosh fought fiercely to bring its two leads -- each of whom won the Olivier Award, London's equivalent of the Tony -- to Broadway. Actors' Equity objected to Salonga because she was not a citizen (she is a Filipino), but eventually accepted her as providing "unique services." Only 17 when she won the role, at 20 she sings with nonstop power and precision and acts with steamroller emotional clarity. Theater insiders compare her to Ethel Merman. Like Merman, she makes a role seem one she was born to play.

Pryce too had troubles with Equity, although it had previously certified his right to appear as an international star (he won a Tony award in 1977 for his Broadway debut in Comedians). Its members objected because he was a white man playing a rare juicy Asian role (the character is actually of mixed Eurasian ancestry) and because he wore special makeup to help. Pryce, a liberal, said he was sympathetic but stubbornly held out to repeat the role, in part because it had been such a stretch to sing musical-comedy numbers after years as one of the West End's foremost interpreters of classics, especially Chekhov. As the Engineer he kowtows and skulks, sneers and connives, yet never lapses into the stereotype of the wily Oriental. This is a man driven to sleaziness by circumstance, a man born to command business but victimized by his race, nationality, time and place. Far from a racist act, Pryce's performance is a deep draft of humanity -- while missing none of the almost Dickensian slime.

Having chosen the ambiance of Vietnam in which to portray a woman seduced and abandoned (albeit more honorably than in Puccini's operatic version of the story), Mackintosh and his colleagues voice great ambivalence about how significant the setting is. Because the performers are so young -- Salonga was just four when Saigon fell, and few of the youths playing soldiers were even in their teens -- the cast was instructed through film and speakers about the mood of those times. But the creators emphasize to all who will listen that Miss Saigon is not about politics. Their edgy manner and the almost rehearsed- sounding consistency of their rhetoric suggest a fear that political seriousness might turn audiences off -- and that an unflinching look at bad memories from Vietnam may be wildly inappropriate just after the buoying triumph of the gulf war.

Some political content is unavoidable. The second act opens with a short documentary, accompanied by a powerful song, about the abundance of children like Kim's -- approximately 20,000 left in Vietnam by American G.I.s. Of these, about 11,000 have immigrated to the U.S. and several thousand others are on the way via camps in the Philippines. Scorned for their mixed-breed otherness and politically suspect American ancestry, these "bui doi" (dust of life) have often been abandoned by their mother, tormented into quitting school and hounded from the work force. But life is not always much better in the U.S. When the fathers can be found, only about 2% show any interest, and the new arrivals are often overwhelmed by poverty and culture shock.

But Mackintosh and his colleagues soft-pedal relevance and liken the show to West Side Story, another classic of thwarted love retold in a modern setting. Says director Nicholas Hytner: "This piece has no political sophistication -- operas never do. Music plays to the heart. It asks an audience to understand that every massive world event has an effect on small people." Mackintosh concedes that some 10 minutes have been cut from the London version but rejects claims that the show has been muted politically. "Half of that," he says, "was scene-change music that was no longer needed because this stage is smaller." But the accusatory Bui Doi number has been toned down, and restaging has softened the starkness of Kim's suicide, placing her child in another room.

Rehearsals for Broadway started Jan. 28, 12 days after the gulf fighting broke out. "We gave that a lot of thought," says co-lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. "If it turns out the timing is not great, we're just going to take our lumps. We decided the only thing that could hurt us would be if we backed off from the show." All in all, they haven't. Miss Saigon is not a documentary, not journalism. But it remains stunningly relevant by the standards of Broadway, and triumphantly Broadway in meeting the standards of relevance.

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With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York