Jessica Black
Updated April 2015
The creators of Miss Saigon began toying with the idea of the show early in 1986, after seeing a picture of a Vietnamese mother hugging her child for the last time before sending her off to live with her GI father in the United States. With the picture in hand, Boublil and Schonberg needed a storyline and found the tragic components that they were looking for in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. The next step was to set the background of the story to cater to the emotions and needs of a modern audience. Through reading political and historical texts on the Vietnam War,visiting a large Vietnamese community in France, and interviewing survivors/witnesses of the war, the dynamic duo was able to conclude that the storyline could be emotionally charged by the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Having decided that the war would be the backdrop to the complexity of the love dilemma, Boublil, Schonberg, and Mackintosh would require the sensitivities of an American and brought lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. onto the project. Maltby stated in an interview “I don’t think Europeans really understood what Vietnam meant to America…Losing this war had a devastating effect on the American spirit”(Vermette, 78).
The American spirit was nearly silenced by the Vietnam War when the US decided to engage in order to prevent a communist reign over South Vietnam, the US viewed this opportunity on a larger scale of containment. This attempt would last almost 15 years and would cost the non-refundable rate of nearly 6 million human beings including 60,000 US Soldiers. Shortly after American soldiers had entered the war, America voted in JFK as the new US President in 1961, his charisma and reluctance to send American troops to Vietnam captured the hearts of Americans. Shortly after, America would be faced with another devastating blow, in the middle of a war that felt hopeless, but the ability to follow a man who signified hope, Americans lost their hopeful symbol when JFK was assassinated in 1963. The American spirit was not equipped to deal with such devastation as the war and the loss of a president, but matters were worsened by predecessor Johnson and the tripling of American troops in Vietnam shortly after his entrance to presidential office. The loss and the war would serve as an emotional deterrent for the souls of Americans over the next decade and the after effects through decades to come. The fatalities and casualties along with the financial sufferings of this war would bring America to their knees and future decades of healing would attempt to lift them back up. The aftermath would continue to stab at the hearts of Americans and the healing process did not begin for nearly a decade after. By 1985, movies and tales of the war had met with little success due to the fact that Americans were still reliving the war in their daily lives, but gradual acceptance was beginning to form. In 1986, Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” captured the war in a way that Americans were finally ready to receive it (including an Academy Award for Best Picture) and paved the road for upcoming entertainment revolved around the war.
With this powerful event as the background to the love story of impossibilities and characters that are honest good-hearted souls trapped in the tragedies of war and politics, Miss Saigon begins to blossom into a reality of the human condition and the wars of life. Throughout the music, the loss of innocence can be heard as well as the defeat of compassion. The instrumentals behind most of the ballads after the fall of Saigon demonstrate a loss of hope and defeat as opposed to the sweet consonance of the previous music when main characters Chris and Kim first fall in love and the world is their oyster. There is one theme that remains the same before and after the fall of Saigon, the image of America as a sanctuary for the Vietnamese characters beginning with “The Movie in My Mind” where Gigi imagines her life in America filled with laughter and ice cream. Sometime after the fall of Saigon The Engineer sings “The American Dream” in which he glorifies everything is for sale, bums have money to spare, there are tits to buy by the pair, and everyone makes more than their share. The end result is Kim handing her son a better life by sacrificing herself and having him whisked away to the American sanctuary where he “…can chose whatever heaven grants,” referring back to “The Movie in My Mind” and “The American Dream.”
Boblil and Schonberg use this historically charged romance to explore the complexity of relations during tragic times as well as to return pride to the US after a disastrous defeat. The overall theme allows the audience to see past the tragic outcomes, fatalities, and sadness of war, when after the dust has settled there remains hope in the arms of the US and despair in the temporarily victorious country. In a way the show brings to light the safe haven that America remained even after the devastation created by the Vietnam War and that no defeat in the history of America has been able to fully take the comfort of that feeling away. The tragedy that befalls the heroine emphasizes the desperation to impose a better life for her child enhancing the faults of her country because in order to give him a chance, she must kill herself so that he may have the choices only America has to offer. The messages are powerful and give America the positive view that was clouded a decade earlier. With the pain of defeat and the heartbreak of death, there appeared to be nothing left for believers in the United States, but Boublil and Schonberg prove that America had much to offer even a few years after the war, but many had been too blinded by devastation to realize that America has one very empowering trait; the power to rebuild.
Follow below link to view the inspirational picture of a woman saying goodbye to her daughter shortly before the fall of Saigon:
http://www.miss-saigon.com/theshow/inspirations.htm
devastation in Vietnam
American Soldiers in Vietnam
Opposition to the War
PHOTOS OF THE VIETNAM WAR: A still shot can not fully capture the devastation such as these photos because moments after the shots are taken, a life could also be taken, which the death toll fully shows. These are all just a moment in time during a decade of extreme uncertainty. Imagine 24 hrs in a day, 365 days a year for well over 10 years…then imagine the images in the photos occurring once every hour for the duration of that time (which in reality might have been every 45 seconds), within your image might be 1/10th of the horror experienced in that single moment.
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