Miss Saigon is a
West End
musical by
Claude-Michel Schönberg and
Alain Boublil, with lyrics by Boublil and
Richard Maltby, Jr. It is a modern adaptation of
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 American
Lieutenant and Japanese
geisha coupling is replaced by a romance between an
American
GI and a
Vietnamese bar girl.It premiered at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in
London on September 20 1989, closing after 4,264
performances on October 30 1999. It opened at the
Broadway Theatre in
New York City in 1991. It subsequently opened in
many other cities and embarked on tours.
The musical represented Schönberg and Boublil's
second major success, following
Les Misérables in 1980. As of April 2009,
Miss Saigon is still the
10th longest-running Broadway musical in musical
theatre history. |
