Word: kim
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...patented English-musical mix of romance and melodrama, soliloquy and strife, all bound up in an unsurpassed spectacle. Seen through the eyes of two Vietnamese characters -- a pimp and hustler of irredeemable cynicism called the Engineer (Jonathan Pryce) and a woman of unquenchable faith and optimism called Kim (Lea Salonga) -- the narrative fuses a crude soap-opera plot with subtle satire of relations between capitalism and the Third World. Big in cast (45), emotion and physical sweep, the story ranges from the neon vice bars of Saigon and Bangkok to the red- bannered propaganda parades and squalid re-education camps...
...nightly newscasts of April 1975: the last U.S. helicopter to leave hovers just above the embassy in Saigon, its rotors whirring and its engine aroar, while behind a barred gate a throng of dependents, informers, helpers and hangers-on howl to be rescued. Among them is the title character, Kim, a peasant virgin turned bar girl turned soldier's wife-to-be, forlornly waving the now useless paper that says she is entitled to join the soldier far away. That moment shapes Kim's life and drives the story toward its tragic reunion. When at last she sees the father...
Dramatically, Kim's lover Chris, his wife Ellen and his friend John are much less important than the Vietnamese, and the action is largely confined to Asia. The play's real subject is what "they" -- Third World people, Asian people -- think of the basically Western "us" that is presupposed to be the audience. To make Kim and the Engineer vivid when they reveal almost nothing of themselves except their fantasies of these distant others requires skillful acting and incandescent star quality. The London production had both, and Mackintosh fought fiercely to bring its two leads -- each of whom...
Some political content is unavoidable. The second act opens with a short documentary, accompanied by a powerful song, about the abundance of children like Kim's -- approximately 20,000 left in Vietnam by American G.I.s. Of these, about 11,000 have immigrated to the U.S. and several thousand others are on the way via camps in the Philippines. Scorned for their mixed-breed otherness and politically suspect American ancestry, these "bui doi" (dust of life) have often been abandoned by their mother, tormented into quitting school and hounded from the work force. But life is not always much better...
...closest match of the day, the Crimson's 70th-ranked Amy deLone battled tooth-and-nail with Kim Chang, a Brigham Young University transfer, but fell to Chang in a third-set tie-breaker...