Word: saigon
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...MISS SAIGON (Broadway...
...this Broadway season, the sole character onstage is a dog. That turns out to be depressingly symbolic. Five years and more in the making, derived from the beloved Thin Man movies, shaped by creators whose credits range from Gypsy and West Side Story through Applause and Annie to Miss Saigon, cast with three Tony Award winners and designed by two more, Nick & Nora should have absolutely everything going for it. But the show that opens on Broadway this week is a crashing bore -- cranky and arbitrary as a love story, tedious and pointless as a murder mystery, ham-handed...
...Francisco restaurateur Jeremiah Tower was teaching Cal-Asian cooking with Ken Frank, who opened La Toque in Los Angeles to show off his ideas. At the same time, ethnic communities were growing rapidly, especially around Los Angeles. The town of Westminster in Orange County was becoming a vast Little Saigon, eerily reminiscent of Vietnam two decades ago. Monterey Park is now the modern Chinatown, where purist chefs from Hong Kong disdain any mixed methods -- and draw their own faithful crowds...
...only slowdown in London comes in musicals. The handful of creators who, in various permutations, have brought forth Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and the like have nothing new or imminent. Still, an irresistibly energetic and shamelessly folksy overgrown cabaret show, Five Guys Named Moe, featuring jazz of the 1930s and '40s and nonstop dancing by an all-black cast, has taken London by storm. It is headed for Broadway next April, complete with group singing of calypso bebop and a whole-audience conga line at intermission...
...blended that cult-movie narrative with snippets of dialogue, some in blank verse (and occasionally in blank mind), and a stompfest of '50s and '60s rock standards (Shake, Rattle and Roll; Great Balls of Fire; Born to Be Wild). London bestowed on it the Olivier award, passing over Miss Saigon and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love. Now the song and story are back where they were born, in the U.S.A., and it all makes for a delightfully silly evening...