Miss Saigon: 25th Anniversary Performance – movie review

Miss Saigon: 25th Anniversary Performance is a deeply moving, richly rewarding film of the play performed at the Prince Edward Theatre in London in 2014 to mark the quarter century of a superb musical.

The epic love story tells the tragic tale of young bar girl Kim, orphaned by war, who in 1975 falls in love with American GI Chris, but their lives are torn apart by the fall of Saigon. This acclaimed new staging of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Miss Saigon was one of the most highly anticipated musical events the West End had seen in recent years. Having just seen it is not hard to see why. I had tears streaming down my cheeks on several occasions.

Several of the musical numbers are hauntingly beautiful and the script is heartbreaking. In one of the greatest performances I have seen on the musical stage, Jon Jon Briones sets the benchmark as The Engineer. He has peerless swagger and bombast. He owns the venue and sings wonderfully. Talking of vocal proclivity, Eva Noblezada is sweet and assured as Kim, an innocent transformed by displacement and war. Alistair Brammer, too, is excellent as Chris, with strong stage presence and another wonderful voice.

What filming the musical has done is allow us to get up close and personal, so we can see the facial expressions as well as the spectacular staging. I felt privileged to be able to do so. The same can’t be said if you are in an audience at the back of a theatre.

My only qualms from a cinematic perspective concerned the sound (which may have played better and stronger at a cinema with surround sound) and the grainy cinematography, which I was acutely aware of in the opening scenes (it just wasn’t as sharp as I had hoped it might be). In terms of the latter, it was particularly noticeable in facial close ups, although that seemed to improve as the show wore on.

That aside, this is a bravura performance of one of the most extraordinary and compelling musicals I have had the good fortune to see, both live a number of times and now as a film. Importantly, the final 35 minutes brings together the original cast with the 25th anniversary cast to sing a few numbers and pay tribute. It is spine-tingling stuff. Original cast members Lea Salonga, Simon Bowman and Jonathan Pryce perform alongside their contemporaries. That is very special indeed and we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it … so please do. As a movie, this special production of Miss Saigon scores an 8 to 8½ out of 10.

Release Date: 13 October 2016
Rating: M

Alex First