Word: pryce
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Musical storytelling gets no better than this tragic tale of lovers divided by the end of the Vietnam war and, more deeply, by the economic gulf between the U.S. and the Third World. As a Vietnamese hustler and would-be American, Britain's Jonathan Pryce gave the performance of the year in a reprise of his West End triumph...
When Miss Saigon opened in London in 1989, it had two stars, Lea Salonga as Kim and Jonathan Pryce as the Engineer. The Broadway production has three. Pryce and Salonga are repeating (indeed, enhancing) their West End triumphs. She is incandescently in command of the stage; he still gets the sardonic laughs owed to his Dickensian lampoon of a conniver, yet has transmuted him into a full-blown tragic figure, a victim of global politics all the sadder for being so streetwise. They are joined in the spotlight by Willy Falk in the role of Kim's G.I. lover, Chris...
...that sum, theatergoers get the 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...
...Pryce too had troubles with Equity, although it had previously certified his right to appear as an international star (he won a Tony award in 1977 for his Broadway debut in Comedians). Its members objected because he was a white man playing a rare juicy Asian role (the character is actually of mixed Eurasian ancestry) and because he wore special makeup to help. Pryce, a liberal, said he was sympathetic but stubbornly held out to repeat the role, in part because it had been such a stretch to sing musical-comedy numbers after years as one of the West...
That was evidenced most clearly in the fervor that this summer surrounded the Broadway staging of Miss Saigon. The producers decided to cast European Jonathan Pryce in the role of a Eurasian, and Actor's Equity made a recommendation that the role be played by an Asian or Asian-American. Editorial pages across the country decried the Union for espousing what they called racism. What happened to the ideal of blind casting...