Story Shines Through Spectacle

“Miss Saigon,” Thursday night, Spokane Opera House

In a mega-musical, certain things come with the territory.

For instance, the sheer spectacle constantly threatens to dwarf the story. This is the danger in “Miss Saigon,” with its flying helicopters and flying Cadillacs. But in the end, the story wins out, which is a victory for both the art form and the audience.

That’s because Alain Boublil and Claude Michel-Schonberg, the composers of this show, are canny storytellers, as they already have proved with “Les Miserables.”

In fact, you might say they are better storytellers than songwriters, which is not necessarily an insult. The audience may not leave the theater whistling any tunes, but they may leave with a catch in their throats and possibly a deeper understanding of the human cost of the Vietnam War.

The story is almost pure melodrama: Boy meets girl, boy saves girl from ruin, boy is wrenched from girl by cruel fate, and boy and girl meet again, years later, tragically. It bears a distinct resemblance to “Madame Butterfly,” and that’s fine: It’s a time-tested story. This is human drama on a grand scale, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s set against a backdrop of this country’s most traumatic war of the last half-century.

This touring production of “Miss Saigon,” which began a 16-show run on Thursday at the Opera House, is better in some ways than it was when I saw it in its inaugural run five years ago in Seattle.

This production boasts a knockout performance by Joseph Anthony Foronda, in the role of the cynical and crude Engineer. This leering half-Vietnamese, half-French pimp presides at the center of the story like the ultimate survivor, who not only endures through the misery of war, defeat and relocation, but who also figures out a way to make money from it. Foronda roams the stage like a cackling rooster, reinventing himself after every setback, even after he’s sentenced to three years in a rice paddy. This is the strongest role of the show, and Foronda makes it seem like the only role.

This is partly because the other male lead, Will Swenson as Chris, had his problems on opening night. Swenson is a good actor and a strong presence, but he could not hit his high notes, a jarring development in a show that is so uniformly well-cast. It sounded to me as if Swenson was suffering from a cold, limiting his range, which means that as the run progresses this problem should disappear.

The female lead, Mika Nishida as Kim, is effective dramatically, especially in her songs of maternal devotion (which seem to be a Boublil-Schonberg specialty) and she possesses a fine voice. The ensemble in general is first-rate.

And the spectacle itself is, frankly, thrilling. I was surprised at how powerful that helicopter scene was, even on a second viewing, and impressed with the pure stagecraft involved in making it feel so real. But I also was struck by how the true impact of the scene has less to do with the helicopter than the situation: The helicopter is simply the roaring, whirling device by which these two lovers are wrenched apart.

The most visually creative scene is the “Morning of the Dragon” scene, in which Communist banners flank the stage as the victorious soldiers celebrate their victory in a dance that reaches back to ancient Indo-Chinese traditions. This is a breathtaking scene done the old-fashioned way, through dance and costume.

As for the music, I was struck by how similar it is to the “Les Miserables” score. I half expected Chris and Kim to break into a “A Heart Full of Love” at any moment. I love the music to “Les Miz,” but since the era and the settings are so different, this does not reflect well on the composers’ versatility. The 19-piece orchestra, by the way, sounded fine.

This is not a show for children; the opening scene is set in a Saigon whorehouse and it is raunchy and crude by almost anyone’s standards. But from there, the story becomes adult in a higher sense of the word, meaning that it presents complicated themes about the real world, without sugarcoating them. As bright blazing spectacles go, “Miss Saigon” has plenty of shades of gray.