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by AMINA HARPER via TC Daily Planet October 04, 2013 Photo by Aaron Fenster, courtesy Mu Performing Arts I don’t know a lot about theater. I worked for a small local theater company in 2010 and I volunteered backstage in my high school’s theater program…
The following is excerpted from Michael Feingold’s review of Miss Saigon, originally published in The Village Voice, April 1991: “Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get Miss Saigon, which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over. After this, I see…
by TIFFANY VANG via TC Daily Planet September 24, 2013 On September 22, 2013, the Ordway Center hosted a Cultural Conversation about their up and coming musical Miss Saigon, which is about a young vietnamese prostitute falling love with an America G.I. during the Vietnam…
by MARIANNE COMBS via MPR September 9, 2013 When Mu Performing Arts convenes a discussion tonight about Ordway’s production of Miss Saigon, the focus will undoubtedly be on how Asian women continue to be portrayed in American and European musical theater as deferential objects of desire. That narrative…
by Sheila Regan via TC Daily Planet September 07, 2013 Photo courtesy Ordway Center for the Performing Arts My fellow arts writers, theater reviewers, and bloggers, I’m writing because I think we should all agree not to review Miss Saigon when it comes to the Ordway….
by MARIANNE COMBS via MPR September 6, 2013 For people like Juliana Hu Pegues, a postdoctoral fellow at Macalester College, the return of “Miss Saigon” to the Ordway this fall is both frustrating and exhausting. “Frankly, I’m outraged!” she says, sitting in her office in Macalester’s humanities building…
by ALISON ROH PARK via RaceFiles “[S]mall, weak, submissive and erotically alluring…eyes almond-shaped for mystery, black for suffering, wide-spaced for innocence, high cheekbones swelling like bruises, cherry lips…. When you get home from another hard day on the planet, she comes into existence, removes your…
by BAO PHI via 18 Million Rising (Italicized words are lyrics taken from the libretto of Miss Saigon) Miss Saigon is a musical about Vietnamese women, who are all victims in need of rescue from the Third World. It is a musical about the inherent goodness…
Prostitution is not a love story. But by focusing on this love story, Miss Saigon ignores or slights the dehumanization and exploitation of prostitution and instead tries to romanticize human trafficking. The musical ignores or slights the fact that this prostitution existed as a result of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam.
As a Korean American adoptee in my early twenties, I think of myself not as Asian American, but just as a person, doing my thing, working for my pay, trying to get along. I am weaving my way through crowded streets toward the restaurant, an Asian woman on a bike. A young White man yells to me, grinning invitingly, drunkenly, “Heeey Miss Saigon!” Miss Saigon is being performed at the Orpheum, just blocks away. I realize I cannot ride a bike in my own city to my own job without being read by random White people as a prostitute.