The most moving love story of our time, Miss Saigon, Cameron Mackintosh’s global smash hit production, had its gala night on Jan. 23 in Vienna, Austria with VBW Artistic Director Christian Struppeck bringing back the famous musical.
The spectacular new version, performed in German with English surtitles, was the opening production at the Raimund Theatre, a 128-year-old newly renovated theatre. The top-notch cast included Vanessa Heinz as Kim, Oedo Kuipers as Chris, Christian Rey Marbella as Engineer, Gino Emnes as John, James Park as Thuy, Abla Alaoui as Ellen, and Annemarie Lauretta as Gigi.
Asked how the Engineer role landed on his lap, musical theater actor, singer, and dancer Chuck Marbella shared that it all started out with an email he received in March 2019.
“I just got home in London after closing the tour in Cologne, Germany in March 2019, when I received an email from someone whose name I cannot disclose, asking me about how good my German is. To which I replied, “I don’t speak German,” he recalled.
“Apparently my name came up in the meeting regarding the possibility of MSVienna in the autumn of 2020. After a couple of months of giving it much thought with my agent, I received an invitation from VBW to fly to Vienna to be seen by the casting and creative team. And here we are,” he went on.
With German as the language to be used for production, Marbella had a short German language course at the beginning of 2021. They also have an in-house phonetics coach that helps the cast out.
Other Filipino cast joining Marbella are Aynrand ‘ab’ Ferrer, Winchester R. Lopez, Vincent Bueno, Judicel Eslao, Nila Axxelson, and Erick Somoza Arenas.
This acclaimed musical production, written by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (the writers of Les Miserables), is an extraordinary masterpiece of a musical that has touched people all over the world for three decades.
The moving love story of Kim, the Vietnamese girl, and Chris, the American GI, and their fateful encounter in Vietnam is brought to life in a lavish staging with haunting music, extravagant choreography, a striking set, and breath-taking technical effects. Not for nothing is the dramatic moment when a helicopter lands on stage considered one of the most unforgettable moments in the history of musicals.