Stage

...There was so much willit-or-won't-it-open publicity about the producer's difficulties in getting Equity approval for the leads he wanted (was there ever doubt in anyone's mind...

...Implicit--and explicit in some of Chris's lyrics--is the idea that the Americans, coming to do good do only evil (ask the Kurds about that), but it is not the central subject of the piece...

...So, in the spirit of the season, I ' d like to announce the first annual springtime awards for the best and worst, silliest and most creative uses of TV...

...She dies prettily in Chris's arms while the other principals stand around looking properly shocked, except for the phlegmatic child who, if this were real life instead of stage life, would probably flip out at fourteen and kill his American parents...

...I assume that his reactions were true aesthetic/emotional responses, but, having a suspicious nature, I wondered if perhaps both his and the general enthusiasm were not a product of the occasion rather than the work itself...

...I expect to see one of those kids turning up shortly on T-shirts like the starving child now known as Les Miz...

...At one point, Brooks starts to become envious of the way Streep's judges are fawning over the perfection of her life, and our hopes are raised that Brooks, torn between love and jealousy, will take us on one of his masterly jags of comic self-destruction...

...I left the theater not humming, but muttering, "you are the sunshine, I am the moon," one of Kim's musical statements on the nature of their love, although I cannot understand why she could not have been the sunshine just as easily and be the moon...

...Perhaps I was overcome by the situation, but the songs all sounded a lot alike to me, and some of Richard Maltby, Jr.'s American words were about as dumb as lyrics get: Ellen, 324: Commonweal at a high emotional moment being forced to sing about there being days like this, and the Chris-Kim duet about the "song on a solo saxophone...

...and the musical has been such a triumph in London that Miss Saigon has become the biggest presold hit in the history of Broadway...

...They meet, fall in love, sing about being in love at great length, and are parted by circumstances--i.e., the last of the Americans getring the hell out of Saigon by helicopter (celebrated stage business) just before the city falls...

...if you've got a hundred bucks, go check it out for yourself...

...Pinkerton, suffers over the loss of Kim and then, apparently as an act of therapy, marries Ellen, the requisite American blonde needed for contrast on the return to the East...

...But Albert Brooks is the lyric poet of hassle...

...Miss Saigon is the story of a doomed love affair between Chris, an American marine who belatedly comes to see the ugly pointlessness of the raunchy life he has been living, and Kim, a Vietnamese village girl who belatedly comes to sell and save herself in the sleazy last days of the Saigon bar scene...

...Because those folks know that January 1 is an elegant fiction foisted upon the overChristmassed, still-hungover consumer market, and that spring is the time when it really all begins again...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE NOTHING TO SING ABOUT 'MISS SAIGON' HITS BROADWAY lie man sitting behind me at Miss Saigon greeted each musical number with sharp, exclamatory bursts of applause and the curtain calls of the principals with deep intakes of breath...

...In years to come, I would hope that Commonweal's readers would feel free to send me, care of the magazine, their own nominations--with the understanding that they may or may I 17May 1991:325...

...We all love awards and we all love lists, and there's a certain solemnity in giving them, a certain humanity even in saying, formally: "We have taken note of what you do--and it stinks...

...The child actor gets tossed around like a beanbag and should be in bed long before the final curtain...

...There are occasional strains throughout that suggest that this is a musical about the East, but the score is as relentlessly Western if not as inventive as Madame Butterfly...

...When he isn't dealing with the mundane hitches of ordinary life, he goes limp...

...The entertainment industry agrees with this mythic view of things...

...By this odd criterion, Hitler must be in seventh heaven and Hamlet's soul would be thrown away after one quick inspection...

...But her work here is monochromatic...

...The air feels fresher, the birds sing more obnoxiously, the cattle on the hill behind my house are regarding one another with more than bovine interest, and---oh yeah--the TV season is grinding to a close...

...And this woman is so obviously headed for a higher existence that Daniel's return to earth would part the lovers forever...

...Chris, who is too wimpy to be as genuinely self-absorbed as Lt...

...Finally, however, all the ugly aspects of the time and the place are subsumed in the timeless, placeless love story...

...Even in Southern California, where the passage of the seasons is about as dramatic as temperature gradations in a Holiday Inn lobby, it feels like spring...

...Fueled by greed, he acts on the assumption that the whole world shares his view of human behavior, and his goal is to reach America, which he sees as his natural home and which he celebrates in "The American Dreams," a song about a materialistic heaven ("The Movie in My Mind," as one of the other songs is called) in which the most arresting image shows him having sex with a limo...

...The music consists primarily of romantic songs performed by Kim (Lea Salonga in fine voice) and Chris (Willy Falk, who seemed a bit nasal to me), together or alone, and by Ellen (Liz Callaway...

...That I was baffled on this point (despite a liberal education which taught me that Renaissance poets loved the moon as woman--monthly changes and all that) probably explains why I found much of the show repetitious and a little foolish...

...There is little real sense that this is the Vietnam that left so deep a wound on America...

...At the end, wanting to save her son even at her own expense (in act 1 she sang about dying for the boy), Kim shoots herself and thus sets up one of the most preposterous final tableaux I can remember having seen on stage...

...There are several vigorous and very similar talk-songs for the Engineer, and at least two big musical numbers, one of them replete with dance acrobats...

...The Grammys, Emmys, and Oscars all cluster liturgically around this time of year: and why...

...Her quest will have to persist...

...And the winner is...

...The joke running through Defending Your Life is that the next world isn't much different from this world: It's just more of the same, without hassle...

...I cannot imagine that my still, small voice of doubt has any resonance amid the hoopla...

...Lee Grant as the prosecutor endows her role with customary sleekness and no-nonsense intensity...

...Kim survives by hook or unexplained crook and, true love being truer in Vietnam, remains convinced that Chris will come back for her and for the son he does not know he has...

...Spring, most archaic societies would agree, is the real new year, the beginning of new life--as Easter and Passover denote--and the time to look forward to new and richer life and take stock of the old one we have just come through...

...But no, the moment passes and we have to settle for a couple of conventional love scenes...

...In Brooks's celestial court, pusillanimity seems to be the worst possible sin...

...So he invented a heroine, also on trial, with whom Daniel can fall in love...

...GERALD WEALES MEDIA THE FIRST "MURRAY AWARDS" WINNERS & LOSERS t's spring...

...Watching Streep toss her tresses and do from-thegut, life-embracing laughs to flesh out what is no more than a notion of the scriptwriters is like watching an athlete do graceful side-bends and leg-stretches and then retire to the showers without ever getting on the field...

...The only real political content in the musical lies with the Engineer, the pimp-hustler played with a fine abrasiveness by Jonathan Pryce...

...For this year's awards, the polling process was easy: I was the nominating committee, the counter of the votes, and the donor of the awards...

...Like Les Misdrables, the other Alan Boublil-Claude-Michel Schonberg megahit, Miss Saigon is going to be around for years, in New York and on the road, and is presumably going to bring joyful tears to a great many people...

...A photograph in the program suggests that an image of mixed-race Vietnamese children brought the composer and the librettist to the story, but that aspect of the work---despite or because of a filmed sequence of such children--seems purely exploitative here...

...does any ritual more clearly demarcate the transition from the old to the new...

...As this paragon, Meryl Streep continues her quest for comedy roles that will complement her triumphs in drama...

...But this is stage life...

...Brooks obviously realized that this wasn't enough to make the audience strain for the hero to win his case...

...For me, Miss Saigon was a miss in more ways than one, but do not take my word for it...

...Daniel learns that denial to a higher existence means only a return to earth for another chance to live decisively...