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| Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon | |
| Posted by: young-walsingham 04:24 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| New Earth Theatre said ‘damaging tropes, misogyny and racism’ in show contradict its values | |
| Link | Here |
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| Michael Feingold’s 1991 pan | |
| Posted by: singleticket 01:10 am EST 11/22/22 | |
| In reply to: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - young-walsingham 04:24 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| To impose the kitsch tragedy of the betrayed geisha and her feckless American lover on the very real tragedy of the betrayed Asian country is a trick of exploitation that someone involved with Miss Saigon must have thought very clever. | |
| Link | Excepts from Feingold’s 1991 review |
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| re: Michael Feingold’s 1991 pan | |
| Posted by: EvFoDr 02:04 pm EST 11/22/22 | |
| In reply to: Michael Feingold’s 1991 pan - singleticket 01:10 am EST 11/22/22 | |
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| Miss Saigon is problematic and that can be discussed, but this review is a bit over the top in assigning such sinister INTENTIONS to the creators. I think some of the OUTCOMES are undeniably problematic, such as the nonsense instead of real Vietnamise, and the hard doubling down on the casting of Pryce ALONG with the yellowface make up. But I think, at least Boublil and Schonberg, had demonstrated depth in their interest in the telling of Les Miz, brimming with humanity and exploration of the human conidition, which was by no means a slam dunk even though we know it became wildly successful. And if you believe them, it was a photo of a child being torn from their mother that inspired them. Do people really think they cyncially thought "we will trick and exploit audiences with this concept!" And they did funnel some of the money to orphange(s) and/programs to help these children. | |
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| "28 YEARS LATER, I STILL DON’T 'MISS SAIGON'" | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 04:22 pm EST 11/22/22 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 04:08 pm EST 11/22/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Michael Feingold’s 1991 pan - EvFoDr 02:04 pm EST 11/22/22 | |
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| It's definitely over the top! And it's meant to be so but there's a moral outrage in the criticism as well. I think a lot of it has to do with the downtown theater scene that the Village Voice covered and which Feingold represented to some extent (in other ways I think he resisted being yoked to "downtown theater" culture). Attached is his reminiscence of the review 28 years later: 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. |
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| Link | 28 YEARS LATER, I STILL DON’T “MISS SAIGON” |
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| re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon | |
| Posted by: Ncassidine 06:16 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
| In reply to: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - young-walsingham 04:24 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| "Kumiko Mendl, artistic director of New Earth, said the musical “normalises harmful narratives in which south-east Asian women are fetishised and hypersexualised. The misogyny is baked into the piece.” Um, yes, that's the point. The show's perspective Is that this is bad. |
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| re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 02:15 am EST 11/22/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - Ncassidine 06:16 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| But the show also exploits a race of stereotypes to tell its story unquestioningly, thus doing the thing you claim it’s condemning. Good for Kumiko to take this stand. | |
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| re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon | |
| Posted by: peter3053 04:42 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - Singapore/Fling 02:15 am EST 11/22/22 | |
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| Not at all. There is a complex range of characters on stage and attitudes on stage. I see people. | |
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| re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 08:15 pm EST 11/24/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - peter3053 04:42 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
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| What exactly is the complex range of East Asian characters we see, aside from virgins, whores, and pimps? | |
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| re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon | |
| Posted by: Ann 06:52 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - peter3053 04:42 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
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| dead people? | |
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| re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon | |
| Posted by: Will 04:30 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
| In reply to: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - young-walsingham 04:24 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| By removing "damaging tropes", "misogyny" and "racism" from being shown wouldn't that be a way of clearing America's name? I don't think I like that. | |
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| Inspiring show | |
| Posted by: peter3053 04:48 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Theatre group pulls play from Sheffield venue staging Miss Saigon - Will 04:30 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| Miss Saigon has been an inspiring show for decades, helping to grow empathy for refugees in a personal dramatic way. Too often judgements of shows cripple them for decades only to be proven wrong. For many years people commented that South Pacific should never be done because it's racist, when people seemingly forgot that it exposed racism. Miss Saigon has done, and continues to do, great good. |
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| re: Inspiring show | |
| Posted by: sf 11:40 am EST 11/22/22 | |
| In reply to: Inspiring show - peter3053 04:48 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| Speaking of Miss Saigon and empathy, the original production's use of footage of real Vietnamese street children - the abandoned Vietnamese children of American soldiers - as set-dressing behind a vapid, fauxspirational, utterly manipulative howler of a song about their plight was crass, insensitive, ugly, exploitative, and tasteless in the extreme. And the use - now corrected, and the only revision in the recent-ish revivals that was an improvement over the original text - of made-up gobbledegook in place of Vietnamese in the Act One wedding sequence was inexcusable. And if I could see, as a not-particularly-"woke" 16-year-old from a very white suburb in the arse end of north-west England, that the yellowface makeup in the London production was just plain wrong, and that while casting Jonathan Pryce as a *Eurasian* character was possibly justifiable (though the make-up was not), casting all-white Keith Burns as Thuy was indefensible, then it probably occurred to at least some members of the production team too. And yet they did it anyway. There's a lot I like about Miss Saigon, actually, and I will try to get to Sheffield to see their revival. Casting Joanna Ampil as the Engineer is a fascinating choice (she was *great* as Bloody Mary in Chichester's brilliant revival of South Pacific last year), and it looks as if the production team are very aware that there are elements of the show that need to be handled very carefully. Much as I like a lot of the show, though, it *is* a deeply problematic piece; given who New Earth Theatre are and what they do, it is not surprising they chose to distance themselves from a theatre that is reviving it. And having said THAT - on the Sheffield Theatres website, Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau - the Artstic Director and Associate Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres - have posted a blog article outlining why they programmed the show and how they intend to approach it, and it makes me more curious to see what they do with it. Link below: |
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| Link | Sheffield Theatres - Programming Miss Saigon |
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| re: Inspiring show | |
| Posted by: peter3053 03:20 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Inspiring show - sf 11:40 am EST 11/22/22 | |
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| I don't see how the use of the footage is any different from the use of images to evoke empathy for the poor or starving which motivate charity work and donations. And given the second act was all about taking responsibility, the song was a cry from the heart. It was genuinely intended, and illuminated something many, up till then, thought little about. Times and availability of Asian actors were different then, and, as the show continued, it brought to light many new talents who then took on the leading roles; also, the show itself became familiar enough that it did not need to depend upon familiar names in leading roles. The show also had a specifically enhancing effect on pride in the Philippines, where my wife is from. (Further, I recall a London company playing the show a few years back did a charity drive to get drama classes into the slums in Manila, paying back, so to speak, out of gratitude for that nation to the show. Anything for those kids is good; I recall being stuck in traffic in Manila, stopped for some time at a corner in a taxi, and seeing two boys, one older, one younger, and their game was for the older boy to sprinkle dirt into the younger one's hand, and then the reverse, them both watching the movement of the grains, then sometimes letting them drop to the ground and form a little cone, before starting again - this for some fifteen minutes, and with shanties behind them leading down to the bay.) Only about 15 years before, Pacific Overtures had struggled to find a complete cast of Asian actors. People forget that the past was different to the present - increased international travel, for one thing, as well as the good example of shows like Miss Saigon and South Pacific, have helped to change what is possible. But the intentions then, of the creators, were entirely good. We should worry more about what we are doing right now - what we take for granted in our actions in our world - because, who knows how we will be judged in the future for what we believe is well intentioned now. And who knows what they will say of us, even when we tried our best with what we were given? |
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| re: Inspiring show | |
| Posted by: sf 06:17 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Inspiring show - peter3053 03:20 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
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| "I don't see how the use of the footage is any different from the use of images to evoke empathy for the poor or starving which motivate charity work and donations." You don't see how using footage of suffering children - REAL children, not actors on a film set - as set-dressing in a commercial enterprise produced in order to turn a profit is any different from using such footage to solicit charitable donations? Really? Wow. |
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| re: Inspiring show | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 02:17 am EST 11/22/22 | |
| In reply to: Inspiring show - peter3053 04:48 pm EST 11/21/22 | |
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| These things aren’t binaries. South Pacific calls out racism while also trafficking in racism. Bart Sher did his best to correct that through his staging, but it’s still baked into the piece. | |
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| re: Inspiring show | |
| Posted by: peter3053 03:01 pm EST 11/23/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Inspiring show - Singapore/Fling 02:17 am EST 11/22/22 | |
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| Quite bizarre claim. | |
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