The Playhouse, Edinburgh
Four stars
“Welcome to Dreamland” says the host known as the Engineer in this rebooted production of lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Vietnam war inspired musical. Originally produced by Cameron Mackintosh, who is still on board with fellow producer Michael Harrison now in charge, Boublil and Schönberg’s epic update of Madame Butterfly is now a staggering 36 years old.
The atrocities of Vietnam and the subsequent fallout that rocked America throughout the 1970s may be getting further away in time, but even on this year’s fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, remains in living memory. Whether Boublil and Schonberg’s vision is an accurate part of that memory is up for discussion, but it remains a theatrical phenomenon that still fills main houses.
Inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese woman leaving her child at the gate of the airport en route to live with their American ex GI father, this is transformed into the story of Saigon bargirl Kim and her brief affair with American soldier, Chris and its long-term consequences. It is 1975, and Saigon is about to be in chaos as its entire population tries to seek sanctuary.
Even the Dreamland lorded over by the Engineer - actually a brothel where American soldiers buy up their fantasies of Asian women - is emptied, with the Engineer setting up in Bangkok with Kim. Chris only finds out about his son three years later. What follows is an uneasy reunion that sees Chris and his new American wife’s lives changed forever.
The songs are still intact in a production now directed by its former associate director Jean-Pierre Van der Spuy, with the show’s grandiose set pieces remaining as big as ever. A new design by Andrew D Edwards puts a small revolve centre stage with lots of space around it. This makes the show feel lighter on its feet, and somehow less bombastic than before. Depite this, the scene with the Americans departure by helicopter while the Vietnamese jostle their way through a crowded airport below remains a spectacularly troubling image.
A cast of seventeen are led by Jack Kane as a heroic Chris and Julianne Pundan as a heartbreaking Kim, with Seann Miley Moore as the Engineer stealing every scene he struts and sashays his way through en route to his own American dream.
For all its brilliantly realised technical largesse, audacious staging and a well-drilled cast bringing Boublil and Schönberg’s compositions to life with sensitivity and panache, Kane’s Chris comes over as a liberal white saviour in the face of Kim’s passivity. Given the mess Chris left behind - a microcosm of the far greater damage caused by his country – the reality check thrust upon him still makes him appear the hero. He might have benefitted more from some harsher words, both from Kim and his angelically accepting wife Ellen, played by Emily Langham. Yes, it’s complicated, but while Chris’s inherent decency is to be applauded, is he really any better than the regiment of army grunts whose behaviour likely turned Dreamland into a nightmare?
Despite this, all involved have given what was starting to feel like an old warhorse of a show - no pun intended - a welcome lease of life. As Chris and co cross the border at the end of the play, leaving Kim behind, it is a mixture of tragedy for Kim and liberation for her son. One wonders how he might have fared as a refugee with his new family, and where he is now in a world currently led by those who would happily see him deported from the land of the free he arrived in. Either way, welcome to America, in an emotional and still moving show that is sometimes caught in the crossfire of its own contradictions.
The Herald, October 31st 2025
Ends
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