STAGE : Mr. ‘Saigon’: Pryce’s Years of Living Dangerously

His right to play the part had been challenged on racial grounds, and now--finally--here he is onstage facing up to the challenge. Watching Jonathan Pryce in “Miss Saigon,” it’s impossible not to see both the character, a sleazy Eurasian pimp driven by greed, and the actor, driven by pride to prove he’s the right man for the role.

It may be that Pryce was impelled by the acrimonious controversy to sharpen the edge of a performance that had already been acclaimed in England. He has to be gratified by the ovation he was given at a preview at the Broadway Theater last week; he had told an interviewer he was “apprehensive” about how he would be perceived in New York.

Pryce plays the Engineer, a small-time hustler beckoned by a vision of fabulous wealth in the United States that never wavers, whether he’s pandering Vietnamese bar girls to American Marines in wartime Saigon or bowing abjectly to conquerors in renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Even before the British mega-musical moved to New York, Pryce’s performance had been described as “dangerous.” The adjective has trailed him throughout his career, as though he were a death-haunted matador with a tendency to work too close to the bull’s horns instead of an actor going mano-a-mano with some of the world’s great roles.

“Miss Saigon,” the British mega-musical that opens on Broadway Thursday night, has done nothing to change the description. A gaunt 6-footer with a harsh voice that scrapes away some of the sentimentality of the updated “Madame Butterfly” story, Pryce plays the cynical Engineer who panders Vietnamese bar girls to American servicemen. And he dominates the show.

Ask “Miss Saigon’s” producer, Cameron Mackintosh, about Pryce’s performance, and he says, “Certainly, the qualities that help him make an almost definitive creation of the role is that he brings an immense amount of danger and sort of seediness to it.”

Offstage, Mackintosh says, Pryce is “very straightforward and exceptionally bright, but in some ways a bit unprepossessing. Yet on the stage he can be like a cobra. He’ll come at you from left field and fix you with those eyes of his.”

The 43-year-old Pryce, whose reputation as one of the finest actors of his generation was built on an array of nonsinging stage and film roles, doesn’t take such descriptions to heart. “Whether I’m going to hit the note or not, that’s the greatest danger about this role,” he kids.

But what of all that career-of-acting-dangerously stuff? That, he says, has to do with how people perceive him. “I don’t go out there intending to create danger . . . I don’t think there’s anything particular in the role. It’s just how I do it.”

Sitting in the office of the show’s publicist, his startlingly light hazel eyes fixed on the interviewer, Pryce is somewhat guarded--and never more than when he talks about the casting controversy that preceded “Miss Saigon” to Broadway. Last summer Actors’ Equity tried, unsuccessfully, to bar him from repeating the role he’d created in London two years ago, maintaining that an Asian-American actor should play the Eurasian role. As a result, Pryce says, he’s “apprehensive” about how he’ll be perceived in front of a New York audience.

“I understand and I’m completely sympathetic to the view of someone who is trying to maintain and create work opportunities for ethnic minorities,” he says carefully. Still, he continues, “I think what you can never do is legislate for talent and people who are equipped to play this role. And I’m certainly not the only person who can play this role or will ever play this role. But at the moment, in these circumstances, it seemed right that I should be doing it.”

It was a role that Pryce’s classics-studded career hadn’t seemed to be pointing toward. Though he had sung before on the stage--he has twice played the Singer in Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle”--he didn’t really think about doing a musical until six years ago, when he went to see his friend Patti LuPone in the London production of “Les Miserables,” created by the team that went on to mount “Miss Saigon.”

“Seeing ‘Les Miserables’ and seeing the power of that piece,” Pryce recalls, “I thought this was just another way of telling whatever story I want to tell. I’d gone from ‘Macbeth’ to ‘Uncle Vanya,’ playing Astrov, and both--well, ‘Macbeth’ especially--I found both physically and mentally demanding and very depressing roles to play.” By contrast, he finds singing onstage “a great release . . . and it’s also quite therapeutic, too.”

Sometime after he’d played Astrov in “Uncle Vanya”--singing a Russian folk song not called for by Chekhov--Pryce’s name came up in a discussion of “Miss Saigon” involving Mackintosh, “Saigon” creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, and the show’s director, Nicholas Hytner. As the producer recalls it, they were tossing around the names of actors to play the tricky part of the Engineer, and Hytner said, “Wouldn’t it be great to have someone like Jonathan Pryce. If only he could sing.” Mackintosh replied, “Well, he can.”

He was remembering a talk he’d had with Pryce about the possibility of the actor replacing Michael Crawford in “Phantom of the Opera.” Though Pryce had taken singing lessons, the idea foundered, the actor says; by then he’d decided he’d “much rather create something.”

To audition for “Miss Saigon” he learned “Willkommen,” the cynical MC’s opening song in “Cabaret.” “And one Saturday,” Mackintosh says, “he came and sang it to us in the empty Palladium Theater in London. Strutted his stuff center stage and knocked us all sideways.”

When “Miss Saigon” opened in London, Pryce knocked the critics sideways, and went on to win the best-actor Olivier Award.

Pryce says he’d always enjoyed acting when he was growing up in Wales. He wound up acting in college and was good enough to be accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

While acting with a troupe in Nottingham, Pryce was seen by Trevor Griffiths, who was writing a play for the company that turned out to be “Comedians.” Impressed, Griffiths tailored the central role for him: a would-be Manchester comic named Gethin Price.

Pryce’s performance--which won him a Broadway Tony Award in 1977--was electrifying. His head shaved, his voice slicing like a blade, Pryce climaxed Gethin’s angry-radical comedy tryout with a ferocious assault on a couple of formally clad dummies that had audiences gasping.

The performance established his “dangerous” reputation, and he reinforced it with his roles in the classics--more audacious by all accounts than his work in such films as “The Ploughman’s Lunch” and “Brazil.”

Most startling of all was his 1980 Hamlet, in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father spoke eerily through Pryce’s melancholy Prince. He took that approach, he says, “because I had had experiences to do with my father after he died--I thought I’d seen him and I thought I’d experienced him after his death. And it was almost like wish fulfillment.”

Now, in the wake of a controversy that put him on front pages and TV news shows, Pryce has become known to a wide public on both sides of the Atlantic. But he says playing the Engineer hasn’t transformed him in any way.

Nor has his unsought fame changed the kind of roles he’s being offered. “Not too many singing pimps,” he jokes.

Just before before doing “Miss Saigon,” he played an insurance collector (based on a figure in a British murder case) in a BBC teleplay called “The Man from Pru” that will be seen next month on public TV’s “Mystery.” Television audiences will also see him as a journalist in a five-hour TV series called “Selling Hitler,” about the bogus Hitler diaries.

“It’s great,” Pryce says happily. “You can go from playing mild-mannered insurance collectors to big musicals to playing mild-mannered journalists and then back into all this.”