Miss Saigon

The opening chorus, sounding the last revel of Saigon before its fall. The noise of the Dreamland bar becomes the music itself.

• The soldiers' shouts and the girls' come-ons cross and overlap in different meters. It sounds like disorderly noise, but the many voices are written to interlock with precision.
• The relentless rhythm of the brass and percussion is paired with the Communist regime's march late in Act I. It is worth listening to the two side by side to hear how the same city came to sound so different in three years.
• A dazzling dance number, yet the harmonies sound somehow sharp-edged. The unease beneath the giddy mood is there from the very start.
• The second track on the 1989 original London cast recording, it follows directly from the overture before it.

The bar girl Gigi sings of a dream of escaping the bar, and Kim adds her voice to that dream. It is the first moment in the noisy opening of Act I when the music grows quiet.

• It begins like the monologue of a weary bar girl and swells as the other girls' voices join one by one. The structure lets one woman's dream spread until it becomes the dream of every woman in the room.
• The moment Kim's voice enters, the timbre clears. The very grain of her voice tells us first that she is someone not yet stained by this world.
• Though it is a song about dreams, the resignation of the minor key outweighs the brightness of the major. It sounds as if those singing already know the dream will not come true.
• On the original London recording, the Filipino actress Isay Alvarez played Gigi. This scene also brings home how many Filipino performers took part in the original cast.

The duet in which Chris and Kim, at the dawn when a night's transaction turned into love, liken each other to the sun and the moon. Here the work's love theme is born.

• Kim sings first, alone, and Chris follows her in. The two voices alternate at first and then join in harmony at the end, so the way the two draw closer is written into the texture itself.
• This melody returns in Act II as a reprise (a song sung again) for Kim alone. The very same tune turns its meaning inside out, from the joy of being together to the ache of waiting alone.
• Lea Salonga's original cast recording is regarded as something of a benchmark for this song. For this role she won both the Laurence Olivier Award and the Tony Award.
• The accompaniment, built mainly on strings and woodwinds, is laid down very thinly, so that for the first time in the noisy first act, only the two voices ring out clearly.

The duet Chris and Kim sing on the night before Saigon falls, as he promises to take her to America. It is a song that pushes away the chaos outside to guard the time that is theirs alone.

• Over a slowly swaying rhythm winds a melody on a saxophone-like wind instrument, recalling the lounge music of an American GI club. The memory of the bar where the two met lingers even within the love song.
• Toward the refrain the pitch climbs and the feeling swells, yet even when the song ends, the harmony sounds as if it has not fully resolved. It can be read as foreshadowing that the promise will not be kept.
• If the earlier “Sun and Moon” is a song of pure first love, this one belongs to lovers about to part. Heard back to back, the two duets reveal how deep the relationship has grown in so short a time.
• On the original recording it was sung by Lea Salonga and Simon Bowman. In every production since, it has remained one of the songs most often sung as a signature number for the roles of Kim and Chris.

At the close of Act I, Kim sings this to Tam, her three-year-old son. It is the first time the sacrifice Schönberg saw in the mother in the photograph takes the form of song.

• It begins low and hushed, like a lullaby, and steadily swells until, at the end, it rings out with the resolve of a mother's vow. Here the frightened girl Kim once was becomes, for the first time, someone who decides for herself.
• This melody returns in the work's final scene. How the vow of Act I comes to its end, the music tells us in that moment.
• Coming just after the march of the communist regime and Thuy's menacing music, this solo song sounds all the more fragile and all the more resolute.
• On the original album it appears as the third track of the second disc. The song that closes Act I thus sits near the start of the album's second half.

At the opening of Act II, John sings of the Amerasian children left behind in Vietnam. It is the passage where a love story widens into the history of a generation.

• The title is Vietnamese for children of the street. It refers to the children born to American soldiers and Vietnamese women during the war and then left behind.
• Begun by John alone, the song grows as solemn as a hymn when a men's chorus joins in. Paired with the photographs of real children projected at the back of the stage, it sounds as though the drama has paused to speak directly to the audience.
• John, a supporting figure throughout Act I, becomes the conscience of the drama with this song. Peter Polycarpou sang it on the original London album and Hinton Battle in the Broadway premiere, and Battle won a Tony Award for the role.
• The song is also a device that carries the story into its next chapter. Through his work with this organization, John will bring Chris word of Kim.

This is the Engineer's solo showcase, in which he sings alone of the dazzling life he imagines in America. It holds the irony that the figure who chases the American dream most relentlessly is also the most cynical.

• A glittering accompaniment in Broadway show-business style and an enormous set are brought to bear. Yet it is built so that the more the splendor is inflated, the hollower it sounds.
• It is nearly the only moment in the whole work that draws laughter, but the final scene follows right on the heels of that laughter. The placement releases the tension even as it makes the ending hurt all the more.
• Jonathan Pryce won the Olivier and Tony Awards for this role, and he sang the song again at the 25th anniversary gala in 2014. In the 2014 revival, Jon Jon Briones took on the Engineer and offered an interpretation of a different grain.
• The hustler's rhythm the Engineer flaunted in the first chorus of Act I sounds as if it has been inflated here to its utmost. The dream that began in the bar of Act I becomes, here, a show of its own.