I dreaded seeing Miss Saigon again. Then I realised things had changed

I’m not the first person to take issue with Miss Saigon. Since its inception in 1989, the musical has become more than a story of Kim, a Vietnamese sex worker torn apart from her White American GI client-turned-lover during the 1975 conclusion of the Vietnam War. The discussion surrounding the production has become its own cultural spectacle, even before “cancel culture” entered the modern lexicon.

In 2018, I wrote a personal essay about seeing the show for the first time as a four-year-old in 1995, and about how the spectre of misrepresentation hung over me throughout my life as a second-generation Vietnamese-Australian woman.

Other critics have taken exception to the portrayal of the two sides of the war – Vietnam as lost cause, America as “a holy grail worth killing and dying for”, according to Diep Tran. In 2019, Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote that the American imagination was seduced by the fantasy of Vietnamese people as “small, weak and effeminate”.

Vietnamese writers and thinkers have explained again and again how the stereotypes impact our communities and yet, the show goes on. So when it came time for me to see Opera Australia’s latest adaptation, and to speak with its key cast members, I was uneasy.

Like other audience members pouring into the Sydney Opera House, I passed the signs warning of “scenes of a sexual and violent nature” and “derogatory and coarse language”.

The curtain rose on bronzed Asian bodies, representing Vietnamese women, standing on table tops and beckoning to panting men in military uniforms. I focused on Kim’s diminutive figure clothed in a white áo dài like the one my mum wore as a high school student, wandering through a nightclub called Dreamland. I watched her, played by Abigail Adriano, being poked, prodded and tossed around like a ragdoll.

The scene threatened to swallow me whole. I heard the phrases “Sex toy from Hanoi” and “The meat is cheap in Saigon”. All I could think about was what the local police in Atlanta had said in 2021, right after a white American man in their community went on a shooting spree across three massage parlours and murdered eight Asian Americans, six of them women; he was simply “eliminating temptations”. Frozen in my seat, the nerves in my forehead pulsed as if a dart had landed between my eyes.

But then, something shifted. When Gigi, played by Kimberley Hodgson, asks her GI client whether he’ll take her back to the States, he brushes her off. The woman who was all smiles a minute earlier suddenly squares her shoulders and I sit up a little straighter. Now, her voice lowers into a snarl as she sings “The movie in my mind, the dream they leave behind.”

I remember coming out on stage and I saw little Asian kids running around in their Anna outfits. I could not have been more proud.

Kimberley Hodgson

Speaking to me after the show, Hodgson tells me about the responsibility she feels to make sure that Gigi’s voice is heard.

“She is a very misunderstood woman who has had to do a lot of things to survive,” Hodgson says. “The resilience and strength I have learnt from her from playing that role... I have never experienced that in another role. This is a show that enables the audience to question history and their own values.”

As a mixed race Filipino-Australian working in commercial musical theatre, Hodgson has either been cast in the ensemble or understudy throughout the past decade of her career.

Loading

“It has been frustrating at times and has made me hungry for more representation within the industry,” she says. “I was doing Frozen at [Sydney’s] Capitol Theatre in Chinatown. I remember coming out on stage and I saw little Asian kids running around in their Anna outfits. I could not have been more proud to be there and for them to see someone like them on stage. It was a turning point for me.”

Filipino-Australian performer Seann Miley Moore has faced similar challenges since graduating from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2013.

“People used to see me, a boy in a dress with lipstick, and think ‘urgh that’s too much’. I had to leave to be seen.”

Things changed after Miley Moore appeared on Britain’s X Factor and gained a standing ovation after belting out a rendition of Freddy Mercury’s The Show Must Go On.

When I observe that the Miss Saigon audience was more diverse than I had expected, Miley Moore replies: “This is a good wake-up call. Asians deserve to be on our main stages. Australia needs to be funding more Asian writers, POC writers. It’s the people in power who have the privilege to right things.”

Watching Miss Saigon, I was floored by Miley Moore’s interpretation of the character of The Engineer, Dreamland’s head pimp, as a queer man. At times, they added extra lines such as “Hands off me, hetero!” with a wink and a shimmy, building instant rapport with the audience.

But it was the American Dream scene that left me with goosebumps. Miley Moore’s voice slithered and shivered, conveying both a lust and a repulsion at the allure of America.

“She goes through an incredible emotional arc. But behind that resilience and strength is such a bright hope.”

Performer Abigail Adriano

“It’s all in the text,” they explain later. “This is where the character should have been from the start. He has an obsession and a longing for America; 1975 is the year the Vietnam War ended; 1969 was the year we had our gay revolution in New York City, the Stonewall riots. [In the scene] I rip my clothes off and become the Statue of Liberty. Freedom and justice for all. But at the same time I’m still commenting on America. Reading the history [of the war], gosh, they really f---ed it all up.”

Abigail Adriano, a Filipino-Australian performer from Western Sydney, also spoke of the personal touch in her interpretation of the lead role of Kim.

“She goes through an incredible emotional arc. But behind that resilience and strength is such a bright hope.”

On stage, Adriano’s voice soars with a powerful clarity that threatens to break apart the diminutive quality of her character. Asked about the production’s significance to her community, Adriano says Miss Saigon was considered a classic for many of her family and friends.

“My mum’s best friend said it [the show] reminded her of what she felt when she was growing up in Olongapo, where a lot of white American GIs were in the ’70s. Miss Saigon resonates with so many people. Like my family, immigrant families. It’s almost uncanny when you look at the fall of Saigon and Afghanistan.”

Both Adriano and Hodgson found the Fall of Saigon scene the most moving to rehearse.

Both Adriano and Hodgson found the Fall of Saigon scene the most moving to rehearse. Vietnamese-American director Theresa Nguyen’s parents were at the American Embassy when the US pulled out, and Hodgson feels a kindred sense of betrayal as the helicopter leaves them behind.

“I know what I felt [on stage] was just a fraction of what the Vietnamese people actually felt. But it will never leave me.”

Watching that scene in the theatre, I sobbed, recalling what my Ba (father) said about that day: “The whole of Saigon felt the pain. I would never crawl towards America after they left us like that.”

When the opportunity emerged to re-engage with Miss Saigon, I wondered if my place as an Asian-Australian writer was confined to making the same complaints. Listening to my fellow Asian-Australian artists with an open heart has shown me that despite the parameters set out for us, our excellence simply cannot be contained. I asked Adriano, Miley Moore and Hodgson about their hopes for the future. Their answer was unanimous: more and better stories about us, by us.

Miss Saigon is at Her Majesty’s Theatre from October 29. Shirley Le’s debut novel, Funny Ethics, is published by Affirm Press ($29.99).