April 30, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: Miss Saigon

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On two bravura sequences which reveal what a musical can do with history, and one definite limitation.

I haven’t had the chance to see a lot of musicals live (Rent is the most notable exception, and remains to this day one of my favorite experiences of live art in any genre/medium), but I did see and enjoy Miss Saigon on Broadway in the mid-1990s. I can’t say I have particularly specific memories of much of it these three decades down the road, but one moment definitely still stands out (as it did at the time as well): the end of Act I, when an actual helicopter (or what sure seemed like one to those of us in the audience) lands on stage at the culmination of a dream sequence about the evacuation from U.S. troops and personnel from South Vietnam in 1975. That was without doubt the most extreme and chaotic thing I’ve seen in a live performance, and I’d say those tones were exactly right for a depiction of what had to be a profoundly chaotic situation on the ground, for the evacuees to be sure but even more so for all those being left behind (like the musical’s heroine Kim, in whose dream about the moment the audience is located).

Nothing else in Miss Saigon was as striking as that helicopter moment, but the second Act does feature its own bravura sequence, one depicting a victory parade of North Vietnamese forces and leaders through the streets of Saigon (juxtaposed with significant and eventually tragic developments for the musical’s South Vietnamese main characters, including Kim and her young son). I don’t remember this moment as clearly by any means, but I do recall a very full stage with its own chaotic cacophony of tones—the celebratory mode of the parade, mixed feelings on behalf of its South Vietnamese audience overall, and an unfolding violent encounter for Kim and those close to her. And that too to my mind captures the multiple layers of the aftermath of the war in South Vietnam and Vietnam as a whole, the varied and contradictory emotions among different communities and even within individuals in such a place and time. Too much of our focus in the U.S. has been on the war and its aftermath from our perspective (understandably, but nonetheless), so there’s a great deal to be said for the musical’s extended focus on Vietnam after the evacuation and fall of Saigon.

A number of late 20^th and early 21^st century musicals have been adaptations of earlier works (Rent is an update of Puccini’s La Bohéme, for example), so it’s not particularly surprising that Miss Saigon was too, in this case an adaptation of another Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly (1904). But I would say that fact reveals a significant problem with Miss Saigon, and not just the obvious that Puccini’s turn of the 20^th century vision of Asia (through his titular Japanese heroine and the opera’s settings alike) is quite outdated at best and Orientalist at worst. After all, even if it weren’t, it’s set in Japan around 1900, not Vietnam in 1975, and there’s simply no way that an adaptation of a work about the former could ever be as specific to the histories of the latter as would be ideal for any work of historical fiction. I don’t know that a central goal of Miss Saigon is doing complex justice to those histories necessarily—but given how much better we still need to remember the end and aftermath of the Vietnam War, I’m glad for the ways this musical can help us do so, and frustrated by its storytelling limitations.  

Next portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?