Claude-Michel Schönberg can’t understand why controversy always follows his second-most famous musical.
opens at the Sydney Opera House on Friday, its composer, Claude-Michel Schönberg, knows that controversy will follow just as sure as a helicopter will hover over the stage in act two., about a big misunderstanding between a Western boy and a Vietnamese girl,” the Frenchman tells. Featuring lyrics by long-time collaborator Alain Boubil, 38 million people in 32 countries have seen the musical since its West End debut in 1989.
Claude-Michel Schönberg has been in Sydney for rehearsals of an Opera Australia production of Miss Saigon, which opens on Friday.“To suddenly be accused of traumatising the Vietnamese community? It was never our intention and I don’t understand it.”but it is certainly the most argued about. Set around the end of the Vietnam War, it follows the doomed romance of Chris, an American marine, and Kim, a 17-year-old Vietnamese orphan forced to work at a brothel owned by The Engineer, a hustler inspired by a French-Vietnamese “dealer in everything” whom Schönberg discovered in a magazine article about the fall of Saigon.Kim has a son by Chris, but ultimately gives him up so the child can be raised American.
“One of the biggest reasons [for the criticism] is the negative racialised stereotypes that it perpetuates, particularly about Asian women,” Erin Wen Ai Chew, a national convener for the Asian Australian Alliance,
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