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
Madame Butterfly (short story) quite empty." According to a book by Jan van Rij, Long's story was loosely based on the birth-mother of Tomisaburo, the British-Japanese adopted son of Thomas Blake Glover and his Japanese wife. Tomisaburo's birth-mother was Maki Kaga, who worked in the pleasure district of Nagasaki (Glover was not his birth-father, however). It was Long's sister Sara Jane Correll who first used the name "Cho-Cho-San" for Maki Kaga. The story also bears many similarities to the semi-autobiographical novel by Pierre Loti, "Madame Chrysanthème", which also was set in Nagasaki and adapted into an opera. Long's use of the exotic and the