I like the girl that is Kim alternate from the clips I can find online. She seems to have a good balance in acting between the innocent Kim and Kim as a mother. Also her singing matches her acting. Does anyone know who the understudy Kim is?
I've got my tickets already! Very, very excited to see the show again. I saw it twice when it first opened in May 1991. I had my tickets for over a year - bought them when they first went on sale, and then the show was cancelled. But, I held onto the tickets, and of course, it opened as originally scheduled.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the Kim alternate? I was not particularly impressed by Eva N. so I am considering catching this when the alternate is on.
Well the alternate is very young (17 or 18 years old) and there are lots of clips of her performing the role online in a community theatre production. She seems green as you would expect but she has a good voice.
“I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then.”
HeleneIsASlut said: "The marquee looks great! I'm super happy for Catherine Riccafort who is in the ensemble. It seems like she is constantly in a different Broadway show!"
I agree! I hope she has more of a featured role in this.
"Oh look at the time, three more intelligent plays just closed and THE ADDAMS FAMILY made another million dollars" -Jackie Hoffman, Broadway.com Audience Awards
In the original Broadway production, the alternate played Wednesday matinees and Saturday evenings. (I saw Lea at the Saturday matinee the day before the Tonys and breathed a big sigh of relief when I realized her alternate was playing that evening.)
Since everything else about this production seems to similar to the first, maybe they'll keep that schedule too.
Just remembering you've had an "and"
When you're back to "or"
Makes the "or" mean more than it did before
I found a full audio recording of the first preview in London in 1989 and it's amazing how good it is. I think 70% of the show is different from the show we know now. It is even very different from the 1989 cast recording we know, some songs have different lyrics or a different key or different melodies in songs.
Here is a clip of "Who says it hurts", and I was wondering if someone could hear the full lyrics.
At 1:58 it seems like she sings: "When we met......In his eyes.......He seemed lost.....". Can anyone hear what the next line is? It is interesting, because later versions of the song had no lyrics about their past, how they met, whatsoever, until "Maybe" was written.
I just heard a recording of "The confrontation" and "Room 317" from the Miss Saigon Broadway revival.
I was a bit shocked by the amount of spoken lines and how forced and insincere the scenes feel because of it. They constantly switch from a spoken line to a sung line, sometimes they even speak a whole line and then sing the last word, which makes it very cringeworthy, and it completely removes the sincerity from the moment. They are basically forcing the audience to switch with them all the time, which makes the sung word feel out of place, and the spoken word after feel out of place too. It reminds me of Hugh Jackman in the les miserables movie, which made people laugh in the audience too.
I have never noticed this unnatural forced feeling in any other production of Miss Saigon nor in any recording. Is the director under the impression that this is raw and gritty? Because in fact, it's not, it's the opposite. Raw emotions lie in the opposite with this material. Making it soap-opera and speak-singing with constant switching makes it clown-esque. Nobody will ever buy speaking 4 words and then use a long vibrato on the 5th. Make up your mind director, which artform is it?
Some if the changes are jarring at first, especially if you are very familiar with the original version. The changes do work fine in the production though, and Eva really sells the emotion. I recommend getting the Blu-ray video of the show from Amazon. The production really is great.
I have the Blu-ray from the 25th Anniversary and have seen the show multiple times in London.
Although it is present in that version too (sometimes going over the acceptable point), it seems like they took it even further (much further) in the Broadway revival.
I am not talking about the changes in lyrics etc. Because I love those for the most part. I am talking about the constant unnatural switching between speaking a word and then singing the next.
It's like an amateur version of the show, where they do not understand the importance of certain syllables or this language in general.
Listen to this clip for example. In other productions, the lines lift you up and completely take you into the character's mind/journey, in the new production it's like they are opologizing for notes and melodies and keep the exact wrong ones short and the wrong ones longer, combined with speaking and then choose the exact wrong syllable to start singing again.