I finally had the chance to see the Broadway revival of Miss Saigon in New York last weekend and I walked into the theater wondering how the play, originally produced in 1991, would hold up. I should not have worried. The musical about the wild evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, with its famous helicopter on stage, and its troubled love triangle, is better than ever.
Will the Vietnam war ever go away? I do not think so, as the large crowd for the play at the Broadway Theater, on Broadway, suggests. We are still trying to figure out what went wrong, what went so terribly wrong and in so many places, in that Asian conflict that took the lives of so many Americans and sent home so many thousands of boys in wheelchairs and with missing limbs.
That is the twisted magic of Vietnam stories in drawing audiences. There were a number of them in the era from about 1980 through the mid-1990s, really good plays and movies, such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, and then they stopped. The war started to fade into the memory of America as the years went by. Well, with his touching, thrilling and over-powering production, the war, and its hundreds of stories, triumphant and torturous, is back.