Is miss saigon based on a true story?

Question

Is miss saigon based on a true story?

Answer 1

No, it's loosely adapted from Puccini's Madame Butterfly, but with a Vietnamese setting instead of one based in Japan. My cousin had a roll in Miss Saigon for years on Broadway in New York, and recently came to visit me in Bangkok where I live, one of the first places she wanted to visit was a go-go bar named King's Corner which was used as a model for the set used in the play.

Answer 2

Miss Saigon is a modern adaptation of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, and similarly tells the tragic tale of a doomed romance involving an Asian woman abandoned by her American lover.  So your answer is NO!  although there are hundreds if not thousands of true stories about similar situations.

Answer 3

Yes and no.  

Yes in the facts of the cruelty and injustice of the Vn war; there had been countless number of cases in which American soldiers left behind Vn girls, who gave birth to many discriminated children called "con lai" (mixed blood) or "bui doi" (the dust of life); and yes, the "last helicopter" scene was real, as many people were left behind, crying and screaming in despair (my 2 uncles were part of that crowd).

No in the fact that the plot is sooo much more glamourized than the countless real-life untold, unpublicized stories that never made it to the press.  We, the Vietnamese, don't even like Miss Saigon, because the plot is that far-fetched:  there were NO romantic love story during this war time; most of the pregnant, unwed Vn girls were innocent village girls, who actually got disowned by their parents and kicked out of the house to roam the streets; the homeless "bui doi" also continued to live on the streets after their mothers died from malnutrition and illnesses because no neighbors would dare to extend a helping hand; less than 0.5% of these children got adopted into other Chinese or Vietnamese families, in which they were pretty much used as slaves; and I haven't witnessed or seen any real case in which the American "father" had returned to fetch for their children, as they wouldn't have any way of knowing that they even had any children left behind.

The most disturbing part was the female heroine ended up killing herself in "honor."  NO, our Vietnamese sense of honor is in SURVIVAL after the war.  In such extremely harsh living conditions after the fall of Saigon, we did not have the choice of "dying for love."  No, we chose to LIVE FOR LOVE, for the love of our family, to honor and serve our elderly parents and grandparents as well as to survive for the sake of the kids.  THAT is the form of sacrifice and honor we believe in and practice.

If Miss Saigon was a compelling story to you, then you should really watch the movie called "Green Dragon."  Although the specific characters were fictitious, it painted a more accurate picture of our experiences.

Answer 4

It's  only an inspiration that evolved from the opera said below.  and it is a by-product of a picture captured during the vietnam war that 'cause lots of lives to be wasted and abandoned but it's only a part of it that made the play sound interesting.They just incorporated that picture.there is a bit of truth mingled with it but not a real-life story.

here is the script taken from an articles posted by wikipedia:

"Miss Saigon is a modern adaptation of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, and similarly tells the tragic tale of a doomed romance involving an Asian woman abandoned by her American lover. The setting of the plot is relocated to the 1970s Saigon during the Vietnam War, and Madame Butterfly's American Lieutenant and Japanese geisha coupling is replaced by a romance between an American GI and a Vietnamese bar girl.

The show's inspiration was reportedly a photograph, inadvertently found by Schönberg in a magazine. The photo showed a Vietnamese mother leaving her child at a departure gate at Tan Son Nhut Air Base to board a plane headed for the United States of America where her father, an ex-GI, would be in a position to provide a much better life for the child. Schönberg considered this mother's actions for her child to be "The Ultimate Sacrifice," an idea central to the plot of Miss Saigon.[3]

Highlights of the show include the evacuation of the last Americans in Saigon from the Embassy roof by helicopter while a crowd of abandoned Vietnamese scream their despair, the victory parade of the new communist regime and the frenzied night club scene on the edge of defeat."

Miss Saigon was part of the major European influence on Broadway in the 1980s, along with the musicals Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Les Misérables.

Answer 5

Short answer:  No.  It's based in part on the Opera Madam Butterfly, though if you dug deep enough I'm sure you could come up with many stories that resembled Miss Saigon.