THEATER

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Pryce too had troubles with Equity, although it had previously certified his right to appear as an international star (he won a Tony award in 1977 for his Broadway debut in Comedians). Its members objected because he was a white man playing a rare juicy Asian role (the character is actually of mixed Eurasian ancestry) and because he wore special makeup to help. Pryce, a liberal, said he was sympathetic but stubbornly held out to repeat the role, in part because it had been such a stretch to sing musical-comedy numbers after years as one of the West End's foremost interpreters of classics, especially Chekhov. As the Engineer he kowtows and skulks, sneers and connives, yet never lapses into the stereotype of the wily Oriental. This is a man driven to sleaziness by circumstance, a man born to command business but victimized by his race, nationality, time and place. Far from a racist act, Pryce's performance is a deep draft of humanity -- while missing none of the almost Dickensian slime.

Having chosen the ambiance of Vietnam in which to portray a woman seduced and abandoned (albeit more honorably than in Puccini's operatic version of the story), Mackintosh and his colleagues voice great ambivalence about how significant the setting is. Because the performers are so young -- Salonga was just four when Saigon fell, and few of the youths playing soldiers were even in their teens -- the cast was instructed through film and speakers about the mood of those times. But the creators emphasize to all who will listen that Miss Saigon is not about politics. Their edgy manner and the almost rehearsed- sounding consistency of their rhetoric suggest a fear that political seriousness might turn audiences off -- and that an unflinching look at bad memories from Vietnam may be wildly inappropriate just after the buoying triumph of the gulf war.

Some political content is unavoidable. The second act opens with a short documentary, accompanied by a powerful song, about the abundance of children like Kim's -- approximately 20,000 left in Vietnam by American G.I.s. Of these, about 11,000 have immigrated to the U.S. and several thousand others are on the way via camps in the Philippines. Scorned for their mixed-breed otherness and politically suspect American ancestry, these "bui doi" (dust of life) have often been abandoned by their mother, tormented into quitting school and hounded from the work force. But life is not always much better in the U.S. When the fathers can be found, only about 2% show any interest, and the new arrivals are often overwhelmed by poverty and culture shock.

But Mackintosh and his colleagues soft-pedal relevance and liken the show to West Side Story, another classic of thwarted love retold in a modern setting. Says director Nicholas Hytner: "This piece has no political sophistication -- operas never do. Music plays to the heart. It asks an audience to understand that every massive world event has an effect on small people." Mackintosh concedes that some 10 minutes have been cut from the London version but rejects claims that the show has been muted politically. "Half of that," he says, "was scene-change music that was no longer needed because this stage is smaller." But the accusatory Bui Doi number has been toned down, and restaging has softened the starkness of Kim's suicide, placing her child in another room.