How a Trip to Vietnam Made Emily Bautista and Anthony Festa's Miss Saigon Performances More Authentic

To prepare for their roles in the Miss Saigon national tour, leads Emily Bautista and Anthony Festa traveled through Vietnam together, as they told Broadway.com’s Ryan Lee Gilbert on #LiveAtFive. Bautista and Festa play Kim and Christopher, respectively, in the musical about a Vietnamese prostitute and an American G.I. caught in a tragic romance during the Vietnam War. 

"There's a lot of joy that they find in the midst of all this chaos and destruction. They find a moment of simplicity just looking into each others eyes," said Bautista. The pair started on the third national tour of Miss Saigon in September 2018 and as part of their process, the entire cast of the show took a trip to Southeast Asia to research Vietnam’s culture and its 20th-century history. The trip was a significant educational step for the artists, who wanted to bring authenticity to Miss Saigon, written in 1989 by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil.

“We got to see the other perspective of the war,” said Bautista, who understudied the role of Kim in the musical's 2017 Broadway revival. “We got to see the Vietnamese perspective—not everything that we learn in U.S. history books. It was kind of eye opening for me, and it brought a new sense to my character as well.”

In Ho Chi Minh City, the two actors visited the Củ Chi tunnels, a vast network of underground channels once used by the Viet Cong as communication and supply routes, and the War Remnants Museum. For Festa, whose character is disillusioned by the end of Miss Saigon, visiting the War Remnants Museum brought into stark focus the human cost of war. “I read all of the stories that the Vietnamese people would tell about the American soldiers and how much of an impact we had in the time that we were there,” he said. “That really opened my eyes to a whole new feeling.” After the visit, singing “Why God Why,” Chris’ lamentation of falling in love during the war, was never the same. “It felt different after that,” Festa said, “after walking through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City."

Miss Saigon is currently on tour now.

Watch the rest of Bautista and Festa's #LiveAtFive interview below.