Christian Maynard as Chris and Desdemona Cathabel as Kim
Shirley and I went to see "Miss Saigon" at The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield this evening. It's not a musical I had ever seen before and I only had half an idea about its plot.
It's mostly set at the time of the American retreat from Vietnam in the mid-1970's. For me, the show was like the proverbial curate's egg - good in parts. I wasn't knocked out by it and partly that was to do with the quality of sound. In my opinion, it needed to be crisper and probably a little louder.
There was some clever stagecraft and a long metal staircase dominated the acting space. It was multi-functional but at it its dramatic best during the airlift from Saigon with Vietnamese citizens clinging to the structure desperate to get away as helicopter blades whirred noisily overhead. Very well done.
Written by by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, with lyrics by Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr., the songs that progress the plot are not as catchy and memorable as one might expect in a top tier musical. Even so it has its moments and at The Crucible there were some very good individual renditions most notably by Joanna Ampil as The Engineer and Desdemona Cathabel as Kim.
While watching "Miss Saigon", I couldn't help thinking of the pointlessness of The Vietnam War, the personal tragedies that were caused and what the hell America was doing there in the first place. What on earth did they hope to achieve?
It is of course very tragic that 58,300 members of the American military died in Vietnam but it is more tragic that 0ver a million Vietcong fighters were killed, 230,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died and over two million Vietnamese citizens lost their lives. And all for what?
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/gKk56db
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق