Reviews

This was a terrific production of Miss Saigon – emotional, spectacular and thrilling. With a cast of 32, and an orchestra of 19, director Michelle Miall time-after-time created memorable theatrical images.

Schonberg, Boublil and Maltby’s sung-through musical, based on Madam Butterfly and set in Vietnam and Bangkok during the Vietnam War, has never failed to move an audience with its powerful and emotive music and this production was no exception.

In Australia we’re blessed with some wonderful, desert-dry political satirists.  Think The Hollowmen, The Chaser boys, The Sydney Wharf Review mob, Clarke and Dawe, to say nothing of our cartoonists, comics and columnists. And with reality stars like Slipper and Thomson, Obeid and Macdonald and all the Sydney rorters at ICAC, who needs to make this stuff up?

Beware! You won’t forget this theatre experience. It engages you, then breaks your heart.

Director David Berthold decided to take a slightly different approach to his production: he brought the action forward to the1970s, adjusted the very 3D action to 2D so he could present it in three-quarters round, and retained many of the playwright’s ‘personal whims about the production’ that modern directors sometimes ignore because they find them twee or unnecessary. Berthold succeeds on all counts.

Being a Williamson play, this sequel to Don’s Party was bound to be clever. By turns catty, conciliatory, witty, and philosophical, it raises the most pressing political question of our time in the context of the 2010 federal election and somehow manages to focus equally on peeling open that most common but most delicate of human foibles, sexual attraction.