Miss Saigon on tour review – a relentless spectacle
- Alice White
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Jean-Pierre van der Spuy’s production is currently playing in Manchester until 15 November and then touring through to 8 August 2026
There are musicals that gently woo you, and then there’s Miss Saigon, which seizes you by the throat as it hurtles through an uncomfortable period of modern history and refuses to let you look away until the final blackout. The revival currently playing at Manchester’s Palace Theatre is a mighty beast of a musical that is bold, bruising and powerful.
From the opening moments in the Dreamland club, the show floods the stage with sensory overload: a crush of bodies, sweaty desperation and a palpable sense that the world is burning far faster than anyone can process. It’s this atmosphere, half-party and half-hellhole that anchors the production so effectively. The Palace’s stage becomes a morally murky playground where, against the backdrop of war, innocence is a currency, survival an art, and hope a fragile, flickering contraband.
At the centre of the whirlwind is Kim, whose performance is the emotional spine of the evening. Julianne Pundan doesn’t play the role as a symbol or victim, but as a young woman navigating an impossible world with a ferocity that keeps sentimentality at bay until you’re least expecting it. Her voice has the crystalline clarity musical theatre fans worship, but it’s the emotional intelligence underneath that makes her unforgettable. “I’d Give My Life for You” lands not as melodrama, but as a deeply human plea from someone already carrying more grief than should be possible.
Jack Kane plays Chris with refreshing restraint. Instead of leaning into the “tragic American hero” archetype, this performance gives us someone painfully aware of his failings, impulsive choices and moral blind spots. When the pair first meet, their chemistry feels instinctive rather than forced, they are simply two people clinging to whatever scrap of tenderness a collapsing world will give them.
Tonight the real winner of Miss Saigon’s diamanté tiara is Seanne Miley Moore as The Engineer. A role that requires the sly swagger and comic timing of the Emcee, the oily charm of a used car salesman and the moral flexibility of a man who sold his conscience a decade ago. This production’s Engineer nails the cocktail. Every scene they touch becomes sharply alive, half satire, half sleaze but all charisma. Their “The American Dream,” bursts onto the stage with an audacity that would feel cartoonish if it weren’t so incisively critical and brilliantly executed.
The spectacle is, predictably, enormous. The staging blends cinematic intensity with theatrical invention, and when that helicopter sequence arrives, it’s handled with far more craft and psychological weight than mere technical bravado. The chaos is felt rather than shown in an intelligent update that respects the moment’s legacy without drowning in nostalgia.
If the production has a flaw, it’s the musical’s own relentless emotional escalation. The plot rarely pauses long enough for quieter revelations. The show prefers sweeping tragedy to subtlety, and at times, you sense it flexing its muscles simply because it can. Thankfully the talented cast are more than capable of maintaining the frantic pace and this gritty revival reminds us all of the horror of war, the trauma of fleeing your country or being abandoned by your so-called protectors.
This revival is a blistering, beautifully performed reminder of why Miss Saigon endures. It’s unapologetically operatic, uncomfortably political, and utterly
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