I’m innocent. I had no idea till after it had happened that somebody with access to the now-moribund Village Voice website had decided to celebrate the 28th anniversary of my review of the Broadway musical Miss Saigon by reprinting it, under the new headline “The Review That—Almost—Toppled Civilization.” (They thoughtfully included, farther down the column, the original headline: “Heat-Seeking Bomb.”)
Obviously, the review attracted such notoriety because it wasn’t very complimentary to Boublil and Schönberg’s musical, or to anyone involved with it. The curious can now find it here.
I hadn’t expected the review to cause any large amount of controversy. My position on the elephantine rock-ized classics perpetrated under Cameron Mackintosh’s producing banner had been well known since the advent of Cats. True, Miss Saigon was nominally the first of such shows to deal with recent history—America’s tragic misadventure in Vietnam—but in terms of substance it was only a pop-rock mashup of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Tosca draped in U.S. Army fatigues—not exactly the newest trick on the block. (See also: Maurice Evans’ GI Hamlet during World War II.) But with one thing and another, the production drove me to a higher pitch of anger than usual, and that clearly communicated itself, making the review a main topic of that month’s New York theater chitchat.
I think probably what pushed me over the edge was the film shown at the top of the second act, showing actual half-American Vietnamese war orphans. A great many people were infuriated by this, including a fair number of my fellow critics. Mackintosh donated a large sum of money to the orphanage where the film was shot, and put a sign up in the lobby saying so, but that didn’t make the outrage—using the plight of actual children to jerk tears for a commercial piece of pop kitsch—any less repugnant. Puccini would not have stooped to it.
Then there was the casting controversy, protests over which regularly cropped up as news items in arts media. It chiefly centered on the shady character of the Engineer, played by Jonathan Pryce. Asian-American actors were angry over both the casting of a non-Asian in this major role (the character is of mixed race), and over the importing of a British actor to play the role in New York. Pryce had won acclaim for the role in London, where he played it in yellowface; the producers’ solution to the controversy here, aside from getting extremely hard-nosed with Actors’ Equity, was to have Pryce forgo the Orientalist makeup, a choice that only made the whole enterprise—see my review—seem all the more threadbare.
At any rate, I was angry, and my anger had its effect. Cultural columnists dropped my name—sometimes with raised eyebrows and sometimes not. (The gay political columnist Michelangelo Signorile, quoting my proposal to do away with the Times and all the Broadway theaters, added, “All I can say is, When do we start?”) Watching the flow of talk and print, I perceived that I had made the strategic error of being too angry: Everybody thought mine was the only bad review Miss Saigon had gotten; in fact, most of the other major reviews were equally negative. I particularly relished Howard Kissel’s Daily News review: His editors had merged Howard’s acrid view of the show’s freeze-dried politics with the production’s other unpleasant innovation, the $100 top ticket price, by adding to his headline the phrase “Hell No, We Won’t Go.”
Naturally, the Voice got letters—though I don’t recall them coming in such a flood as you might expect. Possibly, as with my critic colleagues, the overall negative view of the work restrained people from adding their comments to mine; I had in effect preempted them. One letter that I do remember startling me—as well as the Voice’s editors was an enthusiastic expression of support for the review from Leonard Garment, who had been an important figure in the Nixon White House during the wind-down of the war. This made me highly uncomfortable; I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to be viewed as defending any political position linked to Nixon. On the other hand, Miss Saigon was so blankly one-dimensional in its view of the politics behind the war’s events that it could easily be criticized from both right and left—a blankness that was its ultimate condemnation.
The fallout lingered. From friends who attended the Drama League’s gala that year, I learned that Pryce, in presenting some awards, had cited the review in making an extremely gracious joke against himself. He said he had found my description of him as a “balding, middle-aged Welsh ham” deeply troubling. Coming home from the theater that night, he had asked the doorman of his building, “Would you describe me as a balding, middle-aged Welsh ham?” And the doorman had replied, “I didn’t know you were Welsh.” I admired Pryce’s joke, as I had admired his acting in other contexts; it made me even sadder to think of him trapped in this clotted mess, star salary or not.
Finally, of course, there came the Pulitzers. I hadn’t expected one—the Pulitzer jury had by then a long history of trying to avoid noticing that the Voice existed and was providing a forum for first-class writers and reporters. But the editors put my name in and sent in the portfolio, so I waited to see what would happen.
The results were quite startling. The Criticism panel, a sharp-eyed and intelligent group that included the blessed Molly Ivins, chose three finalists all of whom were Voice contributors. The others were Itabari Njeri, who had written several features for us (she was entered for a series she had done for the Los Angeles Times on black nationalist motifs in the work of young black filmmakers), and Leslie Savan, a regular columnist like myself, who, as one member of the Criticism panel pointed out, had really invented a new category of criticism: She reviewed advertising—billboards, subway posters, TV commercials—as if their aesthetics were worth weighing along with their social and political implications.
I found this, as the Criticism panel must have, a delicious flaunting of the hidebound prejudices of the main Pulitzer jury, composed of the largely male heads of large news organizations, to whom three commentators from the scruffy far edges of cultural criticism were the last sort of people they wanted to bother about. Black nationalist themes in Spike Lee movies? Subway ads reviewed as art? In 1991 these were not on the agendas of the Times and NBC News. Of the three, I was the only one tackling mainstream cultural objects in a widely recognized critical genre—and my approach was not, to say the least, calculated to please the executive echelon.
They sent our portfolios back to the Criticism panel and asked for more candidates. The panel replied indignantly that these were the best candidates, and why had the jury appointed them if it didn’t think they knew their own business? The Pulitzer jury declined to give an award in Criticism for that year. In the theater press, people tended to assume that I was the prime candidate, and the jury’s refusal a direct reaction to my Miss Saigon review, so the whole kerfuffle began again, this time as a tempest in a journalistic teapot. Another of the Pulitzer jury’s missteps that year fanned the flames: The Music panel had chosen Ralph Shapey as the composer most deserving of that year’s award. I love Shapey’s music, which is often violent, dissonant, and bone-rattling, but the Pulitzer jury did not, and allowed one of its members to talk it into naming a more anodyne composer—who turned out to be a great pal of said jury member and a semipermanent houseguest on his estate. It was all very embarrassing, and the simple rejection of the three of us somewhat faded next to it. It left me with a lifelong fondness for even Shapey’s most vehement compositions.
Nearly 30 years later, much of this ancient history seems no more than amusingly quaint. Broadway’s ticket prices have soared into insane regions that make Miss Saigon’s $100 top seem small potatoes. The show has had its success, toured lengthily, and even been revived, though without generating much heat. The emotional manipulations it stoops to continue to seem distasteful to large numbers. When I posted a link to the review on Facebook last month, after it was posted in the Voice, I was startled by the number of friends who wanted to affirm their own distaste for it. And, of course, the U.S. has engaged in a long series of futile wars every bit as quagmiry as the one we foolishly and tragically dived into in Vietnam. But when I start to think that our situation seems hopeless, both politically and esthetically, I console myself with the thought that the theater once made me angry enough to write this, for whatever ripple effect it had, and if I can do it others can and will. It is the nature of the theater to cause talk, and the nature of the critical instinct, even in a time when criticism is downgraded, to talk back to it. I have faith in that instinct.
