A powerful and intoxicating love story performed with intensity and energy is simply timeless and 37 years after opening in London’s West End and the wonderful Miss Saigon is still wowing audiences.
With crashing music and a fabulously interactive modern set, the King’s Theatre in Glasgow was well and truly decamped in the Vietnam war, coming to its end in the early 1970s.
America had occupied the capital Saigon for nearly a decade and the troops and locals were weary of how their lives had become.
Inevitably the two cultures crossed with young American soldiers blowing off steam in seedy nightclubs where vulnerable Vietnamese girls were sold off as companions.
The story centres on American GI Chris (Jack Kane), keen to go home, who meets a terrified Kim (Julianne Pundan) on her very first day at the club, where she is being touted about as “fresh meat” by The Engineer (Seann Miley Moore) and protected by main bar girl Gigi (Thao Therese Nguyen).
Introduced by Chris’s friend John (Dominic Hartley-Harris), there follows the unravelling of a love story as the two wraps themselves together in the highly charged emotion of their plight.
Throw in Kim’s jealous cousin Thuy (Mikko Juan) who believes she is his future wife and it’s a melting pot of tension, passion and destruction, which turns for the worse when the Americans go home, with Chris not knowing he has fathered a child with Kim and Thuy becoming a high ranking officer in the communist Government.
A return trip to Vietnam for Chris and his new American wife Ellen (Emily Langham) stirs up old emotions which end in tragedy.
The main actors are fabulous, from Julianne, making her professional debut, to Jack who is solid and Seann, who steals the show with his captivating performance.
The cast is made up of the ensemble: Bea Ward, Aaron Teoh, Jamil Abbasi, Aaron Aisoni, Daniel J Brian, Ann-Marie Craine, Luoran Ding, Ben Fenwick, Aaron Gonzales, Owen Johnston, Evita Khrime, Caleb Lagayan, Rayhan Lee, Zina Lin, James Mateo-Salt, Shania Montevalde, Ryan Ocampo, Julius Sahr, Tonny Shim, Kerry Spark, Aimee Yue and Carmen Zhu.
The musical backdrop adds to the intensity and the orchestra of Daniel Swani, Maisie Ireland, George Shrapnell, Steve Payne, Dan Taylor, Robert Moseley, Oliver Pooley, Paul Slater, Ben Kennedy, Eleanor Hill, William Harvey and Max Salisbury, under the direction of Ben Mark Turner, are simply superb.
Magical moments include “The Money’s Yours”, “You Will Not Touch Him” and “Paper Dragons”, with sublime singing and instrumental playing.
Resident director Maria Graciano and stage manager Adrian Emmerson have the whole performance spot on, leaving many of the audience in tears after a highly emotional but wonderful piece of theatre.
Miss Saigon runs at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow until 20th June and then moves to The Hippodrome, Birmingham from 23rd to 27th, Blackpool from 30th June to 4th July, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury from 7th to 18th, Bristol Hippodrome from 21st July to 1st August and The Palace Theatre, Manchester from 4th to 8th August 2026.
For more information, tour dates and ticket availability, please visit: www.atgtickets.com and www.miss-saigon.com.
Author Bio:
Rebecca Hay is an experienced travel writer and member of The British Guild of Travel Writers. Follow her adventures with her family on Twitter and Instagram @emojiadventurer and on Facebook via EmojiAdventurers2.
Photographs by Danny Kaan
Be the first to comment