"Miss Saigon' at the Walnut

Whatever happened to Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil? In the early 1990s those Frenchmen comprised the world's most successful songwriting team. Their Les Misérables was a long-running smash on Broadway, the West End and in many other countries, and their new Miss Saigon was a hit as well. Martin Guerre, The Pirate Queen and other new shows were in the works.

How this pair has fallen from favor! Schönberg and Boublil haven't had a successful creation since Miss Saigon, whose last American and British tours ended in 2005.

The new production of Miss Saigon at the Walnut Street Theatre reaffirms the quality of the team's work when they were at their short-lived peak. This play is more compact and focused than Les Miz, and more nuanced than Madam Butterfly, the play and opera on which Miss Saigon is based.

The plot, of course, focuses on the romance between an American serviceman and a young Asian woman (here named Kim), which produces a child. The American goes home and marries a blonde American while Kim awaits his return. When she learns the truth, the young mother kills herself.

Bi-racial babies

Going beyond the simplicity of the original play and opera, Miss Saigon adds the fact that the meeting of the girl and the soldier was engineered at one of the brothels that operated in Saigon during the Vietnam War, capitalizing on the loneliness of the Americans and the poverty of the Vietnamese. The show also portrays the existence of thousands of unwanted babies, shunned by society. As a powerful song tells us, they're called bui-doi: bi-racial children conceived during the war.

The new American bride, Ellen, is fleshed out nicely, and Kate Fahrner, who plays her, is given a show-stopping ballad. Most impressively, Miss Saigon dramatizes the evacuation of the Americans by helicopter while a crowd of abandoned Vietnamese, including Kim, scream in despair.

Do these added details make Miss Saigon better than Madam Butterfly? It's no contest, because nothing here can match Puccini's music. But the Schönberg score is a forward step beyond his Les Miz, with better development of themes and less resort to jingling low-comedy interludes.

Too much repetition

Schönberg still relies too much on repetitions of couplets, which the American lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. mitigates by translating Boublil's words into colloquial and evocative language that's way above the level of Herbert Kretzmer's silly rhymes for Les Miz.

"The American Dream," the climactic scene in which The Engineer explains how American commercialism has motivated his career, is a memorable moment.

(To be sure, the Les Miz story is classic, but its condensation for the musical stage is too convoluted. Audiences are moved by its big moments even while many onlookers can't sort out who is whom among Cosette, Fantine and Eponine.)

Shades of Chorus Line

Bruce Lumpkin ardently directs this production, utilizing sound and visuals to reproduce the arrival and departure of helicopters. He also makes an agile transformation of "The American Dream," which on Broadway used an on-stage Cadillac, into a strutting evocation of A Chorus Line— a fitting parallel of star-struck people dreaming about their future.

Melinda Chua made an appealing Kim, both as a singer and actor. She actually appeared too homespun at her entrance; she was, after all, applying for a job as a whore, but we're supposed to recognize how different she was from all the other girls.

Sleazy business

Eric Kunze as Chris, the American marine, showed the dichotomy of his feelings and belted his songs spectacularly. Philip Michael Baskerville was solid as his friend, who later dedicates his life to rescuing the unplanned children.

Only Bobby Martino as The Engineer was a letdown. His enunciation was terrible, which made it hard to decipher his part in the plot. Also, Martino played the guy as an unpleasant low-life scumbag, when we should feel empathy for a man of some intelligence and ambition who happens to be in a sleazy business.

Douglass G. Lutz did a fine job as conductor of the romantic and poignant musical score.