Tuesday 25 February 2014

remembering the Vietnam war (week 6)

Miss Saigon

   For this topic remembering the Vietnam war I have chosen the show Miss Saigon. The Musical is the story of an American soldier Christopher Scott who whilst in Vietnam falls in Love with a Vietnamese girl Kim. The couple have a child together Tam. The trouble is Chris is already married to Ellen who is back in America. The story ends with Chris taking Tam back to America with his Ameircan wife Ellen; Kim kills herself.
  This musical premiered on the West end in  September 1989 and then two years later on Broadway in 1991. According to Wikipeadia  'The musical's inspiration was reportedly a photograph, which Schönberg found inadvertently in a magazine. The photograph showed a Vietnamese mother leaving her child at a departure gate at Tan Son Nhut Air Base to board an airplane headed for the United States where her father, an ex-GI, would be in a position to provide a much better life for the child. Schönberg considered this mother's actions for her child to be "The Ultimate Sacrifice," an idea central to the plot of Miss Saigon'.
   This musical tells the story of a American soilder fathering a child with a vietamese women during the war, this happened many times with many children 'grew up as the leftovers of an unpopular war, straddling two worlds but belonging to neither. Most never knew their fathers. Many were abandoned by their mothers at the gates of orphanages. Some were discarded in garbage cans'.http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/children-of-the-vietnam-war-131207347/.

 

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