Miss Saigon
| Miss Saigon | |
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Original poster
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| Music | Claude-Michel Schönberg |
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Miss Saigon is a musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, with lyrics by Boublil and Richard Maltby, Jr. It is based on Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, and similarly tells the tragic tale of a doomed romance involving an Asian woman abandoned by her American lover. The setting of the plot is relocated to the 1970s Saigon during the Vietnam War, and Madame Butterfly's story of marriage between an American lieutenant and a geisha is replaced by a romance between an American GI and a Vietnamese bargirl.
The musical was premièred at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, on 20 September 1989, closing after over four thousand performances, on 30 October 1999. It opened on Broadway at the Broadway Theatre in 1991 and subsequently played in many other cities and embarked on tours. Prior to the opening of the 2014 London revival, it was claimed that Miss Saigon had set a world record for opening day ticket sales, with sales in excess of £4m reported.
The musical represented Schönberg and Boublil's second major success, following Les Misérables in 1985. As of September 2015, Miss Saigon remains Broadway's thirteenth longest-running show.
The musical's inspiration was reportedly a photograph, which Schönberg found inadvertently in a magazine. It showed a Vietnamese mother leaving her child at a departure gate at Tan Son Nhut Air Base to board an airplane headed for the United States where her father, an ex-GI, would be in a position to provide a much better life for the child. Schönberg considered this mother's actions for her child to be "The Ultimate Sacrifice," an idea central to the plot of Miss Saigon.
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