Word: saigon
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...Saigon, where park benches are named for Viet Cong war dead, some martyrs to the revolution share their sign space with Kronenbourg beer ads. The place isn't called Ho Chi Minh City as much anymore. The old Saigon is back, and it will meet you, sometime after midnight, at the Apocalypse...
...year from now, Americans and Vietnamese will celebrate, if that is the word, the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. It is safe to predict that we will take the occasion to ask ourselves, again, why we went to war, why we lost, what it was we lost. The rise of free-market economics here makes that question especially slippery. When Saigon seems just as it was before the fall, just as boisterous and kitschy, when a billboard at Hanoi airport advertises VIETNAMERICA EXPO '94, it is easy to conclude that the war in Vietnam must have been...
...Broadway blockbusters as vastly inferior to the hits of yesteryear and to cry out, If only they made 'em like they used to. To me, the Broadway opening last week of a revival of Carousel prompts the thought: Thank God they don't. I'd far rather see Miss Saigon for a fifth time, or Les Miserables for a ninth or even return to The Phantom of the Opera than ever again sit through the longueurs of Carousel, however pretty its candy-box score...
There's little wrong and much beguilingly right with the staging by Nicholas Hytner, who also mounted the grandiose Miss Saigon and the brooding The Madness of George III, and who draws on both styles here. From a leaf-strewn greensward on a hill to a steepled white church in the twilight distance, from the island dunes of a clambake to the fairground fantasy of the title, this production entrancingly conjures iconic places of bygone mill-town New England with expressionistic verve and cinematic speed of transition. The actors are adequate, save for irksome mugging by the chorus...
...avoid the indignity of another Saigon. But the 20,000 primarily Third World troops who remain behind may not be so lucky. The scaled-down force will limit itself to securing a few strategic ports and airports and, where possible, to guarding relief supplies. Even those diminished goals may prove overly ambitious, say some military observers. They argue that with a few well-timed attacks, warlords like Mohammed Farrah Aidid could drive the U.N. forces out. Though the warlord continued to meet last week with other militia leaders to search for a political solution, most observers believe that he will...