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The problem with having Chris more ably played is that his contradictions become apparent. He wants to whore around in Saigon, he wants to readopt the bourgeois values of home; he wants to marry Kim, he recoils at the thought; he wants to reunite with her, he wants to forget; he wants to raise the son they conceived, he wants to send support checks from 10,000 miles away. How can a man so weak-willed be worthy of a woman of such iron strength, one who braves seas, sharks, pirates and a thousand other perils to seek her lost love and save their son?
Falk's daunting task is made worse by the ineptitude of Liz Callaway, a fine singer but no actress, as the American woman Chris marries after he believes Kim is lost to him forever. At a critics' preview last week, several people laughed out loud at her just when tension should have been mounting. The other problem is Thuy, Kim's cousin and her betrothed from her village days. In London he was a scary communist zealot. Now Barry K. Bernal makes him an expedient turncoat whose only zeal is for Kim -- a dull, soap-opera diminution.
Director Nicholas Hytner, in reshaping his London staging to the much smaller Broadway space, made some numbers more intimate but merely cramped others. And even more than in the original version, the show sorely lacks the cinematic fluidity of Les Miserables or The Phantom of the Opera. But Hytner has triumphed at the end, making what used to be an unbearably depressing suicide mercifully less graphic. With set designer John Napier, he has found a less realistic, more suggestive look that better serves the metaphorical layers of this most ambitious musical -- yet is entirely congenial to that helicopter.