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
Portrayal of East Asians in American film and theater Lee Curtis, David Carradine, Joel Grey, and many others. "Madame Butterfly" was originally a short story written by Philadelphia attorney John Luther Long. It was turned into a one-act play, "Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan", by David Belasco. Giacomo Puccini re-made the play into the Italian opera "Madama Butterfly", set in 1904. The 1915 silent film version was directed by Sidney Olcott and starred Mary Pickford. All the versions of Madame Butterfly tell the story of a young Japanese woman who has converted to Christianity (for which she is disowned by her family) and marries Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, a