Last Exit to the Land of Hope

On the night that Les Miserables opened in London in October 1985, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg asked their producer, Cameron Mackintosh, if they now had an assured career in the theater. When he said yes, the two French creators told the impresario they had a new project: they wanted to update the Madama Butterfly story. This time their inspiration was not a 1,000-page Victor Hugo novel but a single news photograph of a Vietnamese mother and daughter parting at an airport. The mother had raised her child with one goal: to locate the girl's father, an American soldier who had returned to the U.S., then send the child off to join him in a life of opportunity in a land the mother would never see. The musical would tell of such a mother, begin in the waning days of the U.S. presence in Vietnam and be called Miss Saigon.

The idea evolved into the most anticipated show in U.S. stage history. Its first phase, a two-record "concept album," turned out to be unreleasable because it unwisely sounded just like Les Miz and had to be junked at a cost of $500,000. But the show was radically revamped and opened on stage in London, where it remains the town's hottest ticket. On its way to Broadway, it ran afoul of the performers' union, Actors' Equity, and assorted ethnic lobbying groups. Charges that Mackintosh had not sought out enough Asian Americans escalated into a probe of racial hiring practices on all his shows; at one point he canceled the Broadway engagement in disgust and, he now reveals, reverted Miss Saigon's rights to its authors. The battles ended, as everyone always predicted, with Broadway making way for a much needed hit.

The first really healthy musical of the 11-month-old season, Miss Saigon will open next week already holding cash and commitments for a record $36 million in tickets -- about double the tally of the former champion, The Phantom of the Opera. It seems set to pay off its production cost of $10 million, also a record, by the turn of the year. In an era when many musicals run a year or two without repaying a cent of their investment, Mackintosh aims to show a profit after 36 weeks, a timetable he accomplished with Miss Saigon in London. Such claims of financial wizardry might be suspect from almost anyone else but this disarmingly frank and casual ex-stagehand. A keen intellect with a common touch, he presented four of the foremost international hits of the '80s, Cats, Phantom, Les Miz and Little Shop of Horrors, and is regarded as the world's nonpareil producer.

Even for Mackintosh, mounting a musical about Vietnam that recalls both the agony of defeat and the shame of abandonment -- and that ends in thwarted love and suicide -- seemed a risky business. Suppressing an impulse to premiere the show directly on Broadway, something he had never done, Mackintosh tried Miss Saigon in the West End, where theatergoing is a steadier habit and Vietnam guilt is not a local concern. He then relied on word of mouth among U.S. tourists to build up a buzz. By now it is a crescendo, enough to let him catapult Broadway's top single-show price to $100, a level previously limited to scalpers, for each of 250 front mezzanine seats, and to $60 for nearly all the rest.