by ADAM CHAU via Gazillion Voices I think in many ways it’s important to understand my frame of reference when thinking about Miss Saigon. I’m a Vietnamese American adopted out of South Vietnam in 1973. I’m a person of color, transracial adoptee, Vietnamese adoptee, Asian…
by SANDY AGUSTIN Three strikes and you’re OUT! I have protested this show three times now, and am exhausted and sick that it has come back to our Twin Cities. In the 90’s, we worked hard to “educate” and dialogue with the Ordway. The administration…
by ADAM CHAU via MPR and Marianne Combs I’m a Vietnamese-American, adopted out of South Vietnam in 1973. I have called the Twin Cities my home for the last 20 years. I am part of a community of color being told, in effect, that it…
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…
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…
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.
