Theatre: Miss Saigon

Saturday, Mar. 05, 2005 - 11:26 pm

(Original Posting at http://irmabelle.diaryland.com)

I got to see the musical "Miss Saigon" tonight at a local theatre, I've never seen it before, or even listened to the music. It was an excellent production, extremely well acted over all.

But...I don't think I liked it. And I can't tell if that's because I couldn't get out of my head and stop analyzing it and just sit back and go with it and enjoy it, or if I truly just didn't like it.

The musical itself, the way it was written, seemed overly melodramatic to me. It was very loud through-out, (my ears are still hurting) there were very few quiet, honest, real moments. A lot of the times the singers were already singing as loudly as they could and they were still drowned out by the orchestra. (But that could have been a technical thing, the sound techs could have balanced the volumes of the music and the voices better, perhaps.) But even so, the singers belted nearly every song as loudly as they could. And somehow they weren't physically connected to what they were singing. They would move occasionally while they sang, but mostly they just stood in one pose. I felt they could have done a lot more with physically expressing the emotional life of the song through body language and facial expressions in addition to vocally expressing it, which they totally were.

It seems to me that "posturing" as they were while singing is common in opera (I've been to see a few with my dad and sister recently), and that's one of the things that really bugs me about opera. And Miss Saigon was much closer to an opera in that respect than to a musical. Even the "spoken" lines were sung, as in opera. The music didn't really get inside me either, some of the songs were pretty or dramatic, but they didn't affect me. (Again, perhaps that's just because I couldn't get out of my head.)

That having been said, this production was well acted, in that all the actors were emotionally honest. They all had excellent singing skills.

And now I don't have anything else to write about. I thought I'd have more to say, but I guess I don't.