THEATER

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

MISS SAIGON Music by Claude-Michel Schonberg

Lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. and Alain Boublil

If spectators can clear their minds of the hoopla about the record $37 million advance sales, the $10 million production cost, the $100 top ticket price, the ethnic controversies over stereotypes and casting, and the residual political furor over the Vietnam War -- in other words, of all the things that make Miss Saigon an event rather than simply an entertainment -- they may find that the musical that opened on Broadway last week is a cracking good show. It blends a love story and a spectacle with tragic social commentary about what the West symbolizes to the Third World, which is not peace and freedom so much as money and security. The plot is the sad, simple story of a soldier and a peasant woman, flung together and pulled apart by twists of fate. The stage mechanics feature that famous (or infamous) last helicopter taking off from the U.S. embassy in 1975, leaving loyal Vietnamese servants behind, and a panoply of Saigon clubs and Bangkok hooker bars, all nighties and neon. But the themes could not be bigger: geopolitical rescue missions that turn into fiascos, whole peoples' opportunities being thwarted through accidents of birth, the sheer randomness of how riches are distributed on this planet.

The blasted hopes of Kim, a country maiden turned bar girl turned bride-to- be turned stateless refugee, are a paradigm for all the promises that Western powers made but failed to keep in Vietnam and other colonies. Her yearning is echoed comically and tragically in her sometime pimp, a Eurasian hustler called the Engineer, whose vision of the U.S. is a pathetic pop mishmash of the Statue of Liberty, big white Cadillacs and Fred Astaire, but whose one certainty is that he was born to live the American Dream -- a hope he will never fulfill. The propulsive narrative works at all times as both romantic melodrama and astringent metaphor. If neither as sprawling nor as thrilling as Les Miserables, the previous musical from French creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, the new show is vastly more relevant and thought provoking.

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, a part that was a cipher in London. Falk finds charm, erotic fervor and moral confusion in a man who serves as a metaphor for the U.S.'s blundering good intentions at playing global policeman. Salonga used to have to carry alone the idea that this was a doomed love worthy of Romeo and Juliet, not just a one-night stand that got out of ^ hand. Now the bedroom scenes smolder -- then ignite so brightly that Kim's faithful years-long wait for reunion and Chris' tormented dreams do not seem like self-delusory claptrap.

The problem with having Chris more ably played is that his contradictions become apparent. He wants to whore around in Saigon, he wants to readopt the bourgeois values of home; he wants to marry Kim, he recoils at the thought; he wants to reunite with her, he wants to forget; he wants to raise the son they conceived, he wants to send support checks from 10,000 miles away. How can a man so weak-willed be worthy of a woman of such iron strength, one who braves seas, sharks, pirates and a thousand other perils to seek her lost love and save their son?

Falk's daunting task is made worse by the ineptitude of Liz Callaway, a fine singer but no actress, as the American woman Chris marries after he believes Kim is lost to him forever. At a critics' preview last week, several people laughed out loud at her just when tension should have been mounting. The other problem is Thuy, Kim's cousin and her betrothed from her village days. In London he was a scary communist zealot. Now Barry K. Bernal makes him an expedient turncoat whose only zeal is for Kim -- a dull, soap-opera diminution.

Director Nicholas Hytner, in reshaping his London staging to the much smaller Broadway space, made some numbers more intimate but merely cramped others. And even more than in the original version, the show sorely lacks the cinematic fluidity of Les Miserables or The Phantom of the Opera. But Hytner has triumphed at the end, making what used to be an unbearably depressing suicide mercifully less graphic. With set designer John Napier, he has found a less realistic, more suggestive look that better serves the metaphorical layers of this most ambitious musical -- yet is entirely congenial to that helicopter.