Poster for Puccini's Madama Butterfly, depicting the show's violent end. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
This blog post is part III in a series about the history connecting Madame Butterfly to David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face. Check out part I here and part II here. To check out the production of Yellow Face now playing on Broadway, click here.
I’m an elder millennial (in other words, I remember before the internet, but only a little). I was about 10 when the first national tour of Miss Saigon came through Denver, where I grew up. Too young to sit through a full-length play myself, but old enough to follow the chatter of the adults in my life, many of whom were theatregoers.
They would not shut up about the helicopter in that show.
Miss Saigon is a lot of things. It is a melodramatic pop musical. It is one of the most popular shows in Broadway history. It was everywhere at a particular moment in the nineties, it broke records for advance ticket sales, and it ran for 10 years straight. It is also a show many people find cringe at best. It still inspires angry reactions. And it will forever be that musical where they flew a helicopter on stage. The helicopter, you see, lies at the heart of the very heart of the matter.
Miss Saigon premiered on London’s West End in 1989. It was the latest from two zhetsetting French writers, composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyricist Alain Boublil. Their previous work had been a smash: Les Miserables (perhaps you’ve heard of it?). Once again, they were working with megaproducer Cameron Mackintosh, whose musical productions of Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and the aforementioned Les Miserables were money-printing machines on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s.
Sleek marketing campaigns were a hallmark of Mackintosh productions. And what did Mackintosh put on the poster, the foundational marketing material, for Miss Saigon?
The poster for Miss Saigon. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
A helicopter.
That’s why people wouldn’t shut up about it. If you paid money to see the Miss Saigon show (and the Miss Saigon show was not cheap), you were paying to see a damn helicopter up on that stage. And Miss Saigon delivered.
The helicopter was also more than just a helicopter. Miss Saigon is a retelling of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The helicopter (paired with the show’s title) is how you knew where the reboot was set. Schönberg and Boublil moved Madame Butterfly to the Vietnam War; a war that was fought with helicopters, from the first service members ferried in by chopper to the last marines evacuated from the American embassy. Helicopters rescued the wounded, fired missiles, and dropped napalm on Vietnamese villages. So when Miss Saigon flew what appeared to be a real helicopter on stage while depicting the fall of Saigon, they weren’t just employing scenic wizardry for a gimmick. They were conjuring the winged beast of a recent nightmare.
One of the most famous images of the Fall of Saigon: a rooftop helicopter evacuation. Many papers incorrectly cited this as the U.S. Embassy, though this was actually an apartment building. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The show was in good company when it came to source material. As discussed in part 2 of this series, David Henry Hwang’s 1988 play M. Butterfly broke apart and dissected Madama Butterfly as commentary on recent world events like the Vietnam War. The creators of Miss Saigon took a different approach. Rather than analyzing the opera, they simply lifted the story of Madama Butterfly and dropped it in 1975 Saigon. Pinkerton is now Chris, a young American marine, and Cio-Cio-San is now Kim, a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who works at a bar/brothel in the closing days of the war. The two are brought together not by a marriage broker, but by a pimp; the crass opportunist known as The Engineer. Chris and Kim fall in love and hold a wedding ceremony. The very next day Saigon falls and the two are separated. When the pair are finally reunited three years later in Bangkok, Chris is traveling with his new American wife and Kim is scraping by as a refugee with The Engineer and Chris’s young son, whom he has never met. Kim kills herself at the end so that her son can have a life in America with Chris; just Cio-Cio-San, only with a pistol.
There is one important development Schönberg and Boublil introduced to the opera’s general arc. In Madama Butterfly, we don’t see Pinkerton’s departure from Japan and we’re never given a reason why he leaves Cio-Cio-San; in part because there doesn't need to be a reason. In the world of the opera, it’s the natural order of things that a young American naval officer would abandon his teenaged Japanese wife. But in Miss Saigon Chris is forced to leave Kim. The fall of Saigon catches both of them by surprise in the midst of their love bubble. Kim tries to find Chris but is unable to get through the gates of the American embassy. Chris searches for Kim in vain, before he’s loaded onto a chopper (the helicopter!) and lifted out of the country. Chris’s cardinal sin in Miss Saigon is not callous disregard for his wife; it’s blind naivete, thinking he can settle down and play house in the middle of a deadly civil war.
The fates of Chris and Kim are set in motion by geopolitical forces beyond their control. I’m sure that message resonated with American audiences in the early 1990s, both those who served in the Vietnam War and those who protested against it. Chris’s naivete is the same naivete with which many Americans supported the war in Vietnam, believing America must be right and American couldn’t lose. It’s a juvenile form of the same racist naivete that blinds Gallimard in M. Butterfly, and it’s part of what many find offensive about the musical. Chris has a bad case of main character syndrome, and Miss Saigon does too. I mean c’mon, it’s a story where the Vietnam War is all about America. The show’s 11 o’clock number is quite literally “The American Dream.”
The character who sings that number is not Chris or Kim, though; it’s The Engineer, whose role in Miss Saigon is far more than just an analog of the marriage broker in Madama Butterfly. Schönberg and Boublil added material to the opera to make the story more recognizable as a musical. So Miss Saigon is not just “Madama Butterfly, but make it the Vietnam War.” It’s also, “Cabaret where you get to see what happens to the characters after the Nazis take over Berlin - but make it the Vietnam War.” In that musical, The Engineer is also the Emcee. He runs the bar/brothel where Kim works; his girls are performers and he helps introduce them with song. He distracts American GIs from their troubles with dancing, sex, booze, and drugs. After the Fall of Saigon, he is instrumental in helping Kim flee to Bangkok, where he is also instrumental in reconnecting her with Chris. He’s greedy and underhanded, villainous but not the villain. He’s too entertaining. His guiding objective is to get to America, and though he never gets his exit visa, at least he gets the 11 o’clock number. Funny thing, though: because of The Engineer, Miss Saigon almost never made it to America itself.
It was not remarkable iwhen Miss Saigon announced in 1990 it would be transferring to Broadway; it was expected. This was a Cameron Mackintosh production by the guys who wrote Les Mis. Of course it was transferring to Broadway. And in many ways it was not remarkable when Mackintosh and his team announced a white actor would be playing The Engineer on Broadway. White actors had been playing Asian characters in yellowface for over a hundred years on Broadway, including Belasco’s original production of Madame Butterfly in 1900 and long before then too.
But New York City in 1990 was not the same city as in Belasco’s time. It just so happens 1990 was the first year the census found a majority of New Yorkers were non-white. This increasingly diverse population included over half a million people of Asian descent. New York in 1990 had not one, but multiple Chinatowns, all of them growing; Lower Manhattan, yes, but also Flushing, Queens and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. What made Miss Saigon’s yellowface casting in 1990 remarkable was that people spoke up against it. And the most prominent voices were none other than David Henry Hwang and BD Wong (our two main protagonists from part 2 of this series).
Here are the basic facts of the now infamous Miss Saigon casting controversy. The actor in question was Jonathan Pryce, a white Welshman who’s perhaps most famous today for his work on Pirates of the Caribbean and Game of Thrones (both of which came long after Miss Saigon). Price had played The Engineer on the West End, with bronze makeup and prosthetics to make his eyes look slanted – though he later removed the prosthetics when he realized most of the audience couldn’t see them. He’d won rave reviews and an Olivier Award (which is like a Tony Award, but British).
A still image of Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer in Miss Saigon's London production, including both his makeup and eye prosthetics.
On June 1, 1990 the production announced Pryce would reprise the role on Broadway. Later that same month, both Hwang and Wong wrote letters of protest to Actors’ Equity Association (the labor union for American stage actors; often referred to as AEA or Equity). As Wong expressed to Equity’s president at the time, Colleen Dewhurst, “Allowing such a blatant example of high profile, racially false casting in our own back yard because British Equity has not taken care of its own members the way A.E.A. aims to would be passive and self-destructive.'' The union’s Commission on Racial Equality, led by actor Chuck Patterson, joined in protesting as well. On August 8, Equity’s National Council denied permission for Pryce to play The Engineer on Broadway, and things escalated quickly. The very next day, Mackintosh announced he was canceling Miss Saigon’s New York City production – $24 million in advance ticket sales be damned.
Mackintosh’s decision caught many by surprise. AEA immediately started to backpedal. Equity members signed petitions in backstage green rooms asking the union to reconsider. Miss Saigon was a big employment opportunity. Mayor David Dinkins got involved. Even Hwang released a statement that he never intended to have Miss Saigon cancelled; he just wanted producers to stop casting white actors in Asian roles.
Op-eds quickly sprouted, a lot of them against Equity’s decision. People wondered aloud if there were going to be blood tests for casting. Some pointed out that The Engineer character was half-French (“Eurasian” was the term of choice), so a white actor had just as much right to the role as an Asian actor. Many said casting should be a two-way street. If Pryce couldn’t play The Engineer, then Morgan Freeman shouldn’t be allowed to play Petruchio and Denzel Washington shouldn’t be allowed to play Richard III (Freeman and Washington were playing these very roles the summer of 1990 in Shakespeare in the Park, and their names were dragged into the Miss Saigon debate).
Mackintosh and the Miss Saigon production team insisted that Pryce was perfect for the role, that he had always been their first choice, and that the show’s success would suffer were he to be replaced. Casting director Vincent Liff insisted they’d done a major international search for talent and hadn’t found anyone else right for The Engineer. (Spoiler alert: not true. Miss Saigon’s casting team had done a major international search for the female lead, Kim, along with other Vietnamese roles, but not The Engineer. Both of the show’s major male Vietnamese roles went to white British actors). Both Pryce and Mackintosh questioned Wong’s motives. He must be protesting because he wants to play The Engineer himself.
When it comes to race and representation in casting, it’s easy to conflate the particular with the universal. In protesting Pryce’s casting, Hwang and Wong were not looking to dictate terms for how every role should be cast on Broadway; they were looking for Equity to take action against a specific problem that had long plagued the industry. For most of its history Broadway had a racist double standard: white actors could play any part regardless of race, but actors of color could only play specific parts that corresponded with their race (or at least, how audiences perceived their race). And still, quality parts of color often went to white actors, while non-white actors were stuck playing minor characters or non-speaking roles.
For Asian actors, these barriers existed well into Broadway’s mid-century golden age, when prominent shows like The King and I and Teahouse of the August Moon featured white actors prominently in yellowface. By 1990, surely, producers in New York should have been aware of the wealth of talented Asian-American performers working in the city. Pan-Asian Repertory Theatre had been operating for almost 15 years by that point (founder Tisa Chang wrote one of the few op-eds in the New York Times supporting Equity’s Miss Saigon decision). Stephen Sondheim’s musical Pacific Overtures featured an entirely Asian and Asian-American cast in 1976. A Broadway musical based on the novel Shogun premiered the exact same year as Miss Saigon and cast Asian actors in the Asian roles (though unfortunately, it flopped; it’s tough condensing a 1,000 page novel into a workable play).
Ellen Holly, the first black actress to star in a soap opera. She played the role of Carla Gray on One Life to Live for over a dozen years. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
I read a number of New York Times articles and op-eds from 1990 while researching this piece. One of the best was written by actress Ellen Holly, who was one of the first black actors to play a lead role on a soap opera. In an op-ed from August 1990, Holly wrote personally about the difficulties of being an actor of color and the frustration of watching famous white actors take some of the few roles open to non-white actors. There was no public outcry then when she lost out on roles because of her race; only now, when a white star lost out on a part due to his. She pointed to the bitter irony of Morgan Freeman’s and Denzel Washington’s Shakespearean performances being used as arguments for letting a white man play an Asian part, since Joseph Papp’s Public Theater (which produces Shakespeare in the Park) was one of the only theatres in the city that practiced nontraditional casting. “The fact remains that without Mr. Papp's vision of an all-inclusive America, whites would be hard put to prove that the ideal world is a two-way street.” Pryce playing The Engineer wasn’t proof that any actor could play any role. It was Broadway’s racist casting double standard, same as it ever was.
Unfortunately, from a legal standpoint, Equity did not have a leg to stand on in its case against Miss Saigon, because Equity actually didn’t have any rules against yellowface. Mackintosh himself pointed this out. They were punishing Miss Saigon for doing something that American productions could do at will. Equity’s own president, Colleen Dewhurst, had played an Asian character in Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan at Lincoln Center. Contractually, there was only one criterion Equity had at their disposal to decide whether or not Pryce could play in Miss Saigon: whether or not he was a star. That was the deal with West End transfers. Recognized British stars were allowed to transfer with shows from London, but all other roles had to go to American performers. And Equity certainly couldn’t argue Pryce wasn’t a star; he’d already been designated one for previous Broadway transfers. The reality was, if Mackintosh wanted Pryce to play The Engineer on Broadway, the American union couldn’t stop him.
A still image from Lincoln Center's 1970 production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan (as the play was then called), with white actors playing Asian chacters, including Colleen Dewhurst. The other actors from left to right are Ray Fry, Sydney Walker and Philip Bosco. Source: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.
On August 16, Equity’s National Council held a follow up meeting on Pryce’s casting. The National Council that governs the union consists of elected union members; in other words, they’re all working actors and stage managers, performing in all sorts of different places around the country, juggling all sorts of different day jobs and working all sorts of different hours. They can’t all be present for every decision. Equity’s first vote in early August had been close, either 22 or 23 to 18 (the union wouldn’t give an official count). With all the controversy surrounding that first vote and numerous petitions from union members denouncing it, a much higher number of council members made it a point to join this second vote. That was enough to clinch it. After meeting for 6 hours, Equity’s National Council voted to approve Pryce’s casting, just over one week after they’d voted to deny it.
The vote did not immediately mean the Broadway production was back on. That announcement took another month to come, in part because of further casting drama; ironically, this time about whether Asian members of the West End cast would also be allowed to transfer, including Lea Salonga in her star-turning role as Kim. This second casting conflict was less controversial and more bureaucratic, all to do with separate work permissions required for West End performers who didn’t have British passports (though of course, this also speaks to Asian performers being placed in a separate category in America). Once it was ironed out, Miss Saigon was officially back. And the rest was history.
Though Mackintosh and Pryce won the day (and Pryce would go on to win a Tony Award for his performance), Hwang and Wong’s protest against the yellowface performance was not in vain. As part of their final agreement with Equity, Miss Saigon’s producers agreed to cast more appropriate actors for The Engineer in future. To date, Pryce is the only white actor to play the role on Broadway. Mackintosh seemed to come away from the experience with a better understanding of race and representation on stage. He credited both Hwang and Wong for raising public awareness about the issue and personally apologized for questioning their motives in doing so.
The Broadway production also made a concerted effort to cast Asian-American actors for the remaining Vietnamese roles and ensemble parts in the show. The New York Times sent reporter Mervyn Rothstein to cover one of the open casting calls. And waddaya know, he got a quote from a then-entirely-unknown Lucy Liu: “Miss Saigon is really important for all Asians. It will have so much to do with what happens in the future for us in the theater.'' This remains part of the musical’s complicated legacy today. For all its (many) shortcomings, Miss Saigon has probably given more Asian-American performers a start in professional theatre than any other show – though I sincerely hope that will not be the case in the future.
A photo that accompanied Mervyn Rothstein's article about Miss Saigon's open call auditions in New York.
Today, the Miss Saigon casting controversy reads a bit like the first draft of a scene we keep rehashing and repeating over and over again. Arguments about race and representation on stage and screen have grown more common over the last 35 years. Public opinion may have shifted a bit on the issue (at least, in lefty cities like New York) and we may now read think pieces on social media instead of op-eds in the newspaper; but still, it feels awfully familiar. Which is why, when David Henry Hwang wrote a play based on his experience with the Miss Saigon brouhaha, it became one of his most successful works in the twenty-first century – though not in the way Hwang originally intended.
Coming up, in our next and final post in this series: Face Value, Yellow Face, and how Hwang turned one of his biggest professional failures into another high water mark.