Last Exit to the Land of Hope

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For that sum, theatergoers get the patented English-musical mix of romance and melodrama, soliloquy and strife, all bound up in an unsurpassed spectacle. Seen through the eyes of two Vietnamese characters -- a pimp and hustler of irredeemable cynicism called the Engineer (Jonathan Pryce) and a woman of unquenchable faith and optimism called Kim (Lea Salonga) -- the narrative fuses a crude soap-opera plot with subtle satire of relations between capitalism and the Third World. Big in cast (45), emotion and physical sweep, the story ranges from the neon vice bars of Saigon and Bangkok to the red- bannered propaganda parades and squalid re-education camps of the Hanoi regime. It embraces chaste Asian weddings and bawdy Yankee beauty contests, a crooning anthem to a glistening American automobile and an austere hymn to a mammoth statue of Ho Chi Minh.

In the show's climactic flashback and visual signature, audiences relive a humiliating moment from the nightly newscasts of April 1975: the last U.S. helicopter to leave hovers just above the embassy in Saigon, its rotors whirring and its engine aroar, while behind a barred gate a throng of dependents, informers, helpers and hangers-on howl to be rescued. Among them is the title character, Kim, a peasant virgin turned bar girl turned soldier's wife-to-be, forlornly waving the now useless paper that says she is entitled to join the soldier far away. That moment shapes Kim's life and drives the story toward its tragic reunion. When at last she sees the father of her toddler son, he is married to another woman. In a desperate moment, Kim does the only thing she can think of to force the father to take his son to the U.S. With her suicide, a story that has been passionate and thrilling turns doom struck, and the hope for which she gives up everything is deliberately left hanging. As she dies, the person holding and comforting the child is not the father nor his new wife nor an American friend on the scene but the Engineer, who has viewed the boy chiefly as a human passport to the paradise of American prosperity. Says Mackintosh: "The audience has to leave not knowing what will happen to the child. That is the truth of the world we live in."

Dramatically, Kim's lover Chris, his wife Ellen and his friend John are much less important than the Vietnamese, and the action is largely confined to Asia. The play's real subject is what "they" -- Third World people, Asian people -- think of the basically Western "us" that is presupposed to be the audience. To make Kim and the Engineer vivid when they reveal almost nothing of themselves except their fantasies of these distant others requires skillful acting and incandescent star quality. The London production had both, and Mackintosh fought fiercely to bring its two leads -- each of whom won the Olivier Award, London's equivalent of the Tony -- to Broadway. Actors' Equity objected to Salonga because she was not a citizen (she is a Filipino), but eventually accepted her as providing "unique services." Only 17 when she won the role, at 20 she sings with nonstop power and precision and acts with steamroller emotional clarity. Theater insiders compare her to Ethel Merman. Like Merman, she makes a role seem one she was born to play.