Actors' Playhouse stages epic Miss Saigon

By Christine Dolen / The Miami Herald

Through the years, since a Kendall couple got the idea to turn an old movie house into a place where theater could happen, big musicals have been a big deal at Actors' Playhouse.

First in Kendall and now for almost 15 years at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables, the theater's leaders -- executive director Barbara Stein, artistic director David Arisco and board chairman Dr. Lawrence E. Stein -- have turned their passion for large-scale musicals into their company's most successful artistic endeavors.

When Actors' does a show like Fiddler on the Roof or Disney's Beauty and the Beast or The Sound of Music, crowds turn out. And, more often than not, awards follow: In the 22 years since the Steins started their company, Actors' and its artists have won 57 Carbonell Awards, South Florida theater's highest honor.

Last season, the theater took on the challenge of producing a beloved Broadway megamusical, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's Les Misérables. That gamble paid off in a first-rate production and a competition-leading dozen nominations for the Carbonells that will be awarded in April.

On Wednesday, Actors' begins two nights of previews before Friday's opening of the other Boublil-Schönberg smash, Miss Saigon. As with Les Miz, it's a show that has visited South Florida on tour several times. And, also, as its predecessor, Miss Saigon is getting its first professional regional production at Actors'.

"I have always suggested Miss Saigon [as a choice here],'' Barbara Stein says. "It's one of my all-time favorites, both the score and the story.''

Miss Saigon is, of course, Boublil and Schönberg's 1989 update of Giacomo Puccini's tragic opera Madama Butterfly. The action is shifted to Vietnam in the mid-1970s, with a U.S. soldier named Chris falling for a still-innocent Saigon bar girl named Kim. They become lovers but are parted as the city falls to North Vietnamese forces. Chris has tried, unsuccessfully, to take Kim with him. What he doesn't know is that she is carrying his child. If you know Butterfly, you know Miss Saigon doesn't end happily for Kim.

Arisco first saw Miss Saigon on a theater trip to London when Actors' Playhouse was still based in Kendall.

"I never thought I'd end up doing it,'' he says. "These shows really push what we're capable of doing. But if we can't do spectacle the way Broadway or a road show does, we focus on propelling the story and making the audience care about the characters.''

That's not to say that Arisco and his design team don't shoot for their version of spectacle. For instance, Sean McClelland, whose Les Miz set is up for a Carbonell, has created the show's multiple locations and a version of its famous helicopter.

"Doing a big, famous musical just requires more of everything,'' Arisco says. "More actors, a bigger band, a more complicated sound palette, a bigger set, more lights.''

The budget is bigger too, anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000, depending on whether you count in-kind donations such as actor hotel rooms. Though Arisco uses a mixture of South Florida and out-of-town talent, 14 of the 24 actors in Miss Saigon live elsewhere. What he got by widening his casting net, he says, was authenticity and experience with the show itself.

CASTING CALLS

"I like to cast locally if I can,'' Arisco says, "but I really wanted to cast Asian actors. . . . We have a handful of actors who have done the show a number of times. And if you've got only three weeks to rehearse, that's helpful. You don't have to focus on who the characters are and what the play means. You can trust that 60 percent of what they bring, you can use.''

In fact, four of the six leading performers in Actors' Miss Saigon have done the show before.

Herman Sebek, who plays the hustling Engineer (the guy who runs the sleazy Saigon bar where Chris meets Kim), performed that role on Broadway during the musical's 10-year run and subsequently played it in numerous other cities. E.J. Zimmerman (the "E.J.'' stands for ``Elizabeth Jung'') has played Kim at regional theaters in Arizona and Colorado (at the latter, she delivered an award-winning performance opposite Sebek). Christopher de Prophetis is again Chris, a part he has played on a national tour and at a regional theater. Chris-Ian Sanchez plays Kim's cruel cousin Thuy, a role he has done in three regional productions.

New to the show and returning to Actors' Playhouse: Amy Miller Brennan as Ellen, the woman Chris marries after returning from Vietnam, and Darryl Reuben Hall as Chris' friend John, whose job connecting children conceived during the war with their American fathers leads to the sorrowful reunion of Kim and Chris.

Hall, who got a Carbonell nomination for his performance in Actors' much-praised production of the Off-Broadway musical Violet, says of the show and his fellow actors, ``It's such a moving piece of musical theater. I'm amazed at this cast. I think people will be blown away by it. The story is just so powerful.''

JUST LIKE OPERA

Miss Saigon is propelled by its through-sung music, meaning that -- as with opera -- the story is told through music and lyrics rather than dialogue.

Sanchez says, grinning, that the show requires "acting-singing; you don't just park and bark.'' Adds Zimmerman, "The music is so emotional on its own that it helps you.''

Sebek says his style of playing the Engineer is different from the way the part was interpreted by Jonathan Pryce. (Pryce originated the role in London and, more controversially, on Broadway, where a brouhaha over casting a British actor to play a Eurasian character led producer Cameron Mackintosh to threaten he'd never open the show in New York if Actors' Equity didn't allow Pryce to perform. The union relented, and the show went on.)

"Jonathan was a snake,'' Sebek says. "I was a weasel; very hyper.''

Sanchez observes that Miss Saigon is a welcome throwback to a different kind of musical.

"On Broadway today, everything is jukebox musicals or a movie adaptation. You don't get the real artistic fulfillment of an epic musical. And it's great to see that in a regional theater,'' he says.

For its just-announced next season, Actors' Playhouse is changing up its formula a bit. It is planning the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz's The Color of Desire, a production of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County, plus the smaller scale 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

But for traditionalists, there's that one big musical next season: Lionel Bart's Tony Award-winning Oliver! And, starting Wednesday, Miss Saigon.