Miss Saigon Miss Saigon Miss Saigon is a musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, with lyrics by Boublil and Richard Maltby, Jr. It is based on 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 1970s Saigon during the Vietnam War, and "Madame Butterfly"'s story of marriage between an American lieutenant and a geisha is replaced by a romance between a United States Marine and a South Vietnamese bargirl. The musical was premièred at the Theatre Royal, Drury
Cambridge Theatre in 1958, Tommy Steele in "Half a Sixpence" in 1963 (678 performances), Bruce Forsyth in "Little Me" in 1964 (334 performances), "The Black Mikado" (1975–76), and in the late 1970s the Kander and Ebb musical "Chicago" ran for 590 performances. More recently the 'rock'n'roll' musical "Return to the Forbidden Planet", which was based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and used 1950s and 1960s songs opened in September 1989 and lasted until early 1993, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Musical—beating the favourite, "Miss Saigon". The controversial show "Jerry Springer - The Opera" had a run from 14 October 2003 –