STAGE : ‘Miss Saigon’ Finally Hits Broadway : After an 18-month run in London, fights over casting, charges of racism and anotherwar’s patriotic fallout, the musical of America’s Vietnam nightmare opens this week

On Jan. 28, as American fliers were pummeling Iraqi forces, the cast of the musical “Miss Saigon” gathered at the Broadway Theater for the first rehearsal of the show’s New York run.

Outside the theater at 53rd and Broadway, as elsewhere in the country, the streets were filling with a jaunty pride over Allied victories in the Gulf War. Inside, actors, songwriters, producers and stagehands were preparing to open an Angst- ridden musical set against the backdrop of America’s biggest military failure--Vietnam.

The inevitable questions echoed through Broadway: would “Miss Saigon,” an 18-month smash on London’s West End, be rendered passe by the mood-altering war in the Gulf? Might the show require revisions to put it more in touch with the new American frame of mind?

Suddenly, “Miss Saigon’s” inexorable journey to Broadway mega-hit status seemed a little less sure, despite having already amassed a record-breaking $35 million in advance ticket sales and bearing a pedigree that put it in a class with “Les Miserables” (created by the “Miss Saigon” team of Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil), “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera” (all produced by “Miss Saigon’s” Cameron Mackintosh).

This circumstance--rehashing Vietnam in the flush of Desert Storm--was not lost on Richard Maltby Jr., “Miss Saigon’s” co-lyricist, and the only American among the show’s three writers. “On the first day of rehearsals we had a meeting to see what our posture would be relative to the war and all this patriotism looming up,” said Maltby, “and we decided the only thing the audience would reject would be falsification of the show, if we softened anything.

“It is quite obvious the euphoria in the United States over Iraq is that it has given us back our mythology. Once again we are the good guys fighting an evil tyrant and winning. This is what we believe we are, and there is such a relief that we don’t have to sit around carrying this horrible burden of being the bad guys fighting a people who didn’t want us and trying to impose our good-heartedness with bombs and napalm.”

So, drastic changes before Thursday’s opening, right? Maltby shrugs, and settles back in a chair in his Greenwich Village office, his Tony for directing “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” on a bookshelf overhead. “The show is what it is, and its time is what it is,” he says. “If you are to deal with a contemporary issue with any kind of honesty, then you’re going to have to take your lumps with the times.”

The French creators of “Miss Saigon” issue a more brusque dismissal of talk about politically inspired revisions. Schonberg and Boublil confirm considerable technical reworking of the lavish production to make it fit on the smaller Broadway Theater stage. In the process they pared five minutes from the musical, changed some cues and used the opportunity to fix a few dramatic moments that have never quite hit their mark. But they insist none of that has changed “Miss Saigon’s” content, nor tempered its emotional charge.

“That was not conceivable in our minds,” says lyricist Boublil, who casts the production team’s discussions about the Gulf War’s specter in a purely rhetorical light. “We just said, ‘Have we picked the wrong date to open the show on Broadway?’ And that was the end of that meeting,” he says. “Someone said, ‘Fate will decide.’ ”

“I don’t think the audience is here to see a political statement or a message about the war,” adds composer Schonberg. “They are only here to experience an emotion and to see a musical.”

A lot of hand-wringing over a musical love story that people are lining up to see, but then, such anticipation is part of the Cameron Mackintosh package. An architect of the highly stylized, highly produced, highly priced musical that overshadowed Broadway in the 1980s, Mackintosh has an imprint that naturally invites comment. But none has matched the intensity greeting “Miss Saigon.”

The concern and fascination over “Miss Saigon’s” American run go back a year to the announcement that a Broadway stage big enough to accommodate the play had been lined up, underscoring the fact that, at $10 million, it is the most expensive production ever on Broadway--not to mention being the first to have a helicopter descend on stage nightly, as happens during “Miss Saigon’s” re-creation of the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy with the fall of Saigon in April, 1975.

Within weeks, “Miss Saigon” was well on the way to its record-setting advance ticket sale, spurred on by word about the successful London engagement and the Mackintosh organization’s aggressive marketing to theater-going groups. Updates on the advance tally heightened the demand for tickets, and by mid-summer, “Miss Saigon” had racked up $25 million in sales. The production had become a Broadway legend nine months before it opened.

Then, it became a controversial legend.

Mackintosh announced to the surprise of few that his London lead, British actor Jonathan Pryce, would reprise the role of a Eurasian pimp called the Engineer in the Broadway production. Pryce’s performance had won him the Olivier Award in London, and years earlier he’d won a Tony for his performance in “Comedians”; add the critical raves he’d won in London for “Miss Saigon,” and he would have seemed a cinch qualifier as an “international star” under union agreements that allow non-Americans to play roles here.

But “Miss Saigon” was a high-profile opportunity for Actors’ Equity to make a point about minority under-representation on the American stage, and it chose to take a stand over the casting of Pryce. Equity declared flatly that Pryce could not play the Engineer on Broadway, that the half-Asian character would have to be portrayed by an Asian-American actor, or not at all. Mackintosh, for his part, stood steadfast; he said that he would have Pryce or no one, and canceled the production.

That decision hit Broadway like a bomb, and in the heated weeks of accusatory finger-pointing and side-joining that ensued, the American theater world was deeply, painfully rent by the dispute.

“As the writers, while (casting) is not our problem,” said Schonberg, “we were of course very upset because the show was in danger from an artistic point of view.”

“The people, they had a good reason for the controversy,” Boublil added, “surely so they were just using the wrong show for it, the wrong tool, and they probably knew it. . . . It’s just a bit distressful for writers when the show, what they think is a piece of musical theater, suddenly becomes subject of controversy, discussion in restaurants, a piece of gossip for the gossip column in the newspaper, a subject for betting between people--’Will the show come to New York?’--and suddenly the work is not a work anymore. And some people I’m sure were very sincere among the Asian actors and took it very very seriously and they were discussing it like we had nothing to do anymore with the show. It had become everyone else’s property.”

The issue was resolved in Mackintosh’s favor when Actors’ Equity, under enormous pressure from its own members, backed off. Still, there remain lingering resentments on the losing side of the dispute.

There also is the promise of new, separate protests. The focus of this discontent is the show’s alleged stereotyping of Asian characters--the oily, exploitative Engineer, the submissive and self-betraying Miss Saigon, the degrading lifestyle of the Asian bar girls.

“Even the American GIs are cardboard characters,” says Yoko Yoshikawa, whose “Heat Is on Miss Saigon” coalition plans to picket opening night. Yoshikawa adds, “We’re saying, ‘Look at the way Asians have always been portrayed--Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan and Suzie Wong.’ ”

Actors’ Equity briefly tried to force Mackintosh to cast an Asian-American in the female lead role, Kim, instead of Lea Salonga, a Filipino who also won an Olivier Award in London; that effort was more quickly and quietly abandoned than the Pryce battle, and Salonga, who was selected for the role after an international search, opens on Broadway with Pryce.

All of this played into the deep reservoir of resentment toward the big-hype, big-budget British import that so dominated the American stage during the 1980s, and, with the closing of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s loss-laden “Aspects of Love,” raised anew the question: Is the British invasion finished?

Perhaps not quite yet. The preview run of “Miss Saigon” has ignited new interest in the show, and the daily box office take has jumped to an average of $100,000; $60 orchestra seats are gone until June, and the $100 front mezzanine is sold out until July (although newspaper ads still tout “a few good seats” available now).

And, lyricist Maltby insists, “Miss Saigon” will succeed or fail in New York on its own merit, not as the signal product of a trend in the musical theater.

“I think that the American press is lying in wait for the big British musical these days,” Maltby said. “There’s nothing we’d like more than to slam another elaborately produced British epic. Well, what are we (Americans) producing? I think there’s a lot of sour grapes there. Our musical theater is not turning out the masterworks these days. And it’s embarrassing that a bunch of people from England seem to be doing it better.

“It’s partly because American musicals, leaving Stephen Sondheim aside, tended to bring revamped versions of old forms over and over again, and they didn’t startle you. American composers had gotten embarrassed to have big, bold, touching melodies and suddenly it was startling that a show would come along and really deliver and ride on the energy of a melody, which is what Andrew did and Claude-Michel and Alain do. It’s reinventing the form. They’re adding impulses of grand opera, operetta and sung melodrama to the story-telling know-how of the American musical theater. And it’s exciting. And audiences get really moved by it.

“Soon enough,” the lyricist added, “America will do something else.”