YELLOW
FACE
Dramaturgy by Jamie Lin
FOOTLIGHT CLUB · FEB 2025
?
The Miss Saigon controversy
TIMELINE
Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boubil — the white male team behind Les Miserables — are reportedly inspired by a 1975 photo of a mother leaving her child at Tan Son Nhut Air Base (on right), as well as Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, to create a new musical set in 1970s Vietnam during the war, Miss Saigon. [1]
Late 1980s
Credit: @ThePeopleSing
As documented in The Making of Miss Saigon, the all-white all-male casting team launched a “painstaking worldwide search” for lead role Kim, as for an “Asiatic” (not Vietnamese) woman who could “sing European music.” After decrying American & Canadian auditioners as or “Asian in looks only,” they brought their search to the formerly colonized Phillippines.
There they found Lea Salonga and others, though notably Filipino male actors were only cast for minor roles. “From the beginning, the team set out to cast white British actors for the lead ethnic roles of the Eurasian Engineer and Viet Cong Thuy.” [2] Jonathan Pryce were cast as the Eurasian Engineer and Keith Burns as Viet Cong Thuy, a fully Vietnamese character.
1988
From The Making of Miss Saigon
YELLOWFACE �ON WEST END
Jonathan Pryce and Keith Burns in “bronzing cream and eye prostheses” to play their roles on the West End, which Pryce openly described in an interview.
TIMELINE
Miss Saigon opens in the West End to rave reviews, with no objections from British critics.
1989
The New York Times, August 8, 1990
Miss Saigon prepares to move to Broadway. On August 7, the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) refuses Pryce’s transfer, on the basis of his yellowface. Playwright David Henry Hwang and actor B.D. Wong also write open letters of protest.
The British Actors’ Equity association critized the AEA ruling on the basis of “artistic integrity and freedom” while producer Cameron Mackintosh threatened to cancel the show altogether, with little regard to the 29 AAPI actors who would be out of a job �if he did so.[3]
Editorials in The LA Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and �The WSJ all insisted on keeping Pryce. Pressure from Mackintosh, the public, and other AEA members led to AEA reversing its decision and allowing Pryce on Broadway, though notably he performed the role with far less makeup and prosthetics (see right). Pryce eventually won the 1991 Tony for his performance.
1990
Also see: Miss Saigon at the 1991 Tonys
"The casting of a Caucasian actor made up to appear Asian is an affront to the Asian community. The casting choice is especially disturbing when the casting of an Asian actor, in the role, would be an important and significant opportunity to break the usual pattern of casting Asians in minor roles."
ALAN EISENBERG
Actors’ Equity executive secretary
SCENES OF PROTEST
"Asians are survivors. And at that point we had never been portrayed as survivors.”
— Diep Tran, Editor-in-Chief of Playbill
AFTERMATH
For the 2014 revival and since, Miss Saigon has only cast actors of Asian descent in the roles of Thuy and the Engineer. For the original 1991-2001 Broadway run / 1992-2000 US Tours, the roles were mostly played by Asian actors, but not always: Puerto Rican/Colombian actor Yancey Arias played Thuy during the 1991-2001 run.
Jonathan Pryce, in a 2016 interview, had this to say: “If it was right for a non-Asian actor to play that role then, it should still be right for him or her now. If the argument is valid that any actor of any race should be able to play any role, then it is a two-way traffic. But I am all for supporting the fact that more opportunities need to be made for non-white actors."
FURTHER LEARNING
The Miss Saigon Controversy