‘Saigon’ Is Under Fire Once More : Theater: Vietnamese-Americans charge the hit London musical stereotypes, demeans the Vietnamese.

The beleaguered production of “Miss Saigon” has come under new attack, this time from Vietnamese-Americans who charge that the hit London musical stereotypes and demeans the Vietnamese.

“Again and again, Hollywood and the theatrical world have exploited the Vietnam War, and here we go again,” said Chi-Muoi Lo, a Los Angeles actor and playwright who is organizing Vietnamese community protests against the play.

In Orange County, where about 100,000 Vietnamese refugees have settled since 1975, two Vietnamese-language newspapers have run editorials criticizing the play in the past two weeks.

Criticism of “Miss Saigon” has largely focused on whether Caucasian actors should be cast in Asian and Eurasian roles. But in the past two weeks, several Vietnamese-Americans, including two newspaper editors and several actors and business people, have taken aim at the substance of the play itself.

“It doesn’t matter to us if in ‘Miss Saigon’ the role of the half-French, half-Vietnamese character (the Engineer) is given to Jonathan Pryce or to a Filipino or Chinese actor . . . ,” Nguoi Viet columnist Bui Bao Truc wrote last week. “The image of the Vietnamese has already been distorted.”

In particular, these critics object to the main character, a bar girl who falls in love with and is deserted by an American GI. Lo and others charge that this reworking of the “Madame Butterfly” theme furthers the relentless stereotyping in Western books, movies and plays of Vietnamese women as bar girls, prostitutes or mama-san.

“It is demeaning to the Asian community as a whole to have Asian women continually portrayed as prostitutes,” said the 24-year-old Lo, whose credits include appearances on the TV show “China Beach.”

Lo also complained that the song “American Dream,” in which the Eurasian engineer played by Jonathan Pryce sings of his desire to become an American, is demeaning in its implication that Asians would rather be white.

“It’s a racist play,” Chinese-American playwright Frank Chin said earlier this week. Chin said the play implies that Asian women “crave white rescue, and the tragedy is that Miss Saigon chooses the wrong white rescuer--but there she is, like Vietnam, supposedly, abandoned to fate, to the communists.”

Instead of lobbying to have Asian actors cast in the Asian roles, Chin said, Asian-American actors should boycott the production entirely.

Marc Thibodeau, a spokesman for “Saigon” producer Cameron Mackintosh in New York, said Tuesday that Mackintosh would have no immediate comment.

However, Thibodeau said “Saigon’s” characters are complex and multidimensional, and he released a letter written to Mackintosh by a British charity, which brought several Vietnamese war orphans to see the London production. The letter praised the show and said the refugees, now women in their early 20s, were deeply moved.

Yen Do, editor of the Westminster-based daily Nguoi Viet, said the storm over “Miss Saigon” in the English-language media has rekindled longstanding complaints about Hollywood’s treatment of the Vietnam War.

Many Vietnamese, including veterans of the South Vietnamese army, have complained that films such as “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Casualties of War” have reduced the Vietnamese characters to bit players in their own civil war.

“Saigon” spokesman Thibodeau said Mackintosh would have no comment on any aspect of the show until after meeting with Actors’ Equity later this week. Although the actor’s union has reversed its controversial decision to bar Pryce from co-starring in the Broadway production, Mackintosh has said he wants more guarantees of artistic freedom before he agrees to bring the show to New York. Thibodeau declined to specify what kind of guarantees would be sought.

“He’s talking about the principle of artistic freedom as it applies to several issues in the show,” Thibodeau said.

As for the Vietnamese criticisms, Thibodeau noted that the main character is a bar girl but not a prostitute.

“I wonder how many of them have actually seen or read the play?” Thibodeau said.

“The show portrays the Vietnamese characters in it as very multidimensional, very complex,” he said. “Kim (the ‘Miss Saigon’ character) is an amazing person who sacrifices her whole life for her child. She’s no two-dimensional stereotype.”

Reaction from other Vietnamese-Americans was varied.

Kieu Chinh, once the leading lady of Vietnamese cinema and now an actress in Los Angeles, said she would like to see a new angle on Asian women explored.

“Now it is time to talk more about Vietnam than only soldiers and blood and barbed wire . . . ,” she said. “I would like to talk about how war affects people, women and children and families, instead of presenting Vietnamese women to the world as bar girls who wear miniskirts and low-cut blouses . . . .

“I have nothing against that kind of story, but I wish that other stories would be told, too.”

Duc Au, a UC Irvine student and radio talk show host who has sharply criticized “Platoon,” said he found nothing offensive in “Miss Saigon.” He said traditional Vietnamese literature includes many stories in which a daughter sacrifices herself into prostitution to support her family.

“We have to be on the offensive only when something depicts us as shallow or is demeaning in some way,” Au said. “But we shouldn’t make a commotion about this one because we don’t really have a case.”

Co Dang Long Pham, president of the Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce, said he does not object to the contents of “Miss Saigon” but is irritated by the absurdities that ensue when Vietnamese roles are played by other Asians or whites. Among the worst offenders, he said, are TV shows and movies in which purported Vietnamese characters begin mouthing Asian-sounding gibberish or speaking a language other than Vietnamese.

“They should get as advisers real Vietnamese, so they could make movies like the real thing, not always to see things from the Caucasian point of view,” Pham said. “Now Americans see these movies and they don’t even know what real Vietnamese look like.”

Thibodeau said the producers of “Miss Saigon” had advertised in Nguoi Viet seeking Vietnamese actors in January and had spent three days auditioning candidates in Santa Ana and Los Angeles in preparation for the anticipated New York production.

No casting decisions have been made, he said.