There is no helicopter and no monumental crowd, no white Cadillac and no Ho Chi Minh Statue. What might seem like a cut in the first place - the smaller stage and the simple stage mechanics - turns out to be the big advantage of the show. At the theatre in St. Gallen you are much closer to the dramatic happenings on stage, which makes the Vietnam-based musical more intense and suspenseful, and which leads the audience's attention directly to the plot and the characters. The original director Nicolas Hytner will have to forgive, but with such a staging, with a special eye on each main character, this show becomes totally different from when the 6th or 7th cast would simply cover the original. The first independent production of Miss Saigon does not need to hide behind the original German production. Actually, this one is better.

In St. Gallen they found a director who not only knows the show by heart, but who obviously loves it. Matthias Davids reflects each nuance during the love between Kim and Chris and even when they are appart, he lets the memory of it shine in their faces. Also Davids discarded all the scenes of overwrought emotions and sweet Asian charm, for example during the wedding scene. Kim's suicide is not a ritual anymore, it's a pure act of despair; Chris is not yelling "No" at the end, he is just distraught and crying silently. Whether it comes from the lead actors or from the sensitive and natural direction, the result is more honest than it was in Stuttgart. Everything fits, like the light brown hair of little Tam.

Ruby Rosales doesn't simply fill out the cliché of an Asian child-woman, she develops a touching, strong almost tangy personality. She never slips into a charming doll, she leaves out the weeping and the sweet girlie voice while she is singing.

If it was his intention or not, Jesper Tydén is playing a very absent Chris who seems to be quite naive, too naive for Vietnam. This might explain his astonishment in the end, but then he is not completely innocent in the tragic events, he realizes how he hurt Kim when he married Ellen.

While both sing with a clear pronunciation (which makes it more obvious how poor Heinz Rudolf Kunze's translations sound), the rest of the cast suffers from an enormous accent - but aren't we used to it with Miss Saigon?

Surely, James Sbano hits the greasiness of the Engineer wonderfully, but there are long stretches of the show where you are not aware what he is actually singing. Also, Michael Kelley's John gives us the question of whether his great voice during "Bui Doi" excuses his lousy pronunciation. The role of Thuy gets a very special taste with the Dutch accent of the, other than that, oustanding Thuy. In fine German instead, Eva Gullvag Aasgaard shows a certain and clear portrait in the ungrateful role of Chris' second wife, Ellen.

The quite small ensemble is supported by an amateur cast and the chorus of the local opera. The musical director Christoph Wolleben knows how to make the score sound good.

The whole show is set in the steel frame of a crashed American airplane which is placed on a wheel so it can be turned and played on each side. The night club, Kim's room, the streets of Bangkok and the hotel room, all those locations are surrounded by the ruins of war. The technical staging is perfect and gives the show highly dramatic moments, especially during the fall of the American embassy in Saigon. Davids and his stage constructor Hans Kudlich work with metal fences, which are always risen up somewhere new. The soldiers reach the invisible helicopter with ladders. For the "American Dream" they give us dancing Elvis Presley look-alikes and the huge fire of Lady Liberty. Also they show the New York ticker-tape parade. The American kitsch is shown by Dennis Callahan as perfectly as Bob Avian, and is still different to his original choeography. He does the same with the marching crowds of Vietnamese soldiers. Noelle Blancpain's costumes impress by their changing looks from polyester shirts to indish dresses from the 70s, everything can be found. Only Chris' white Popeye pants look kind of funny.

Also, this new production proves in a glorious way that a good musical can gain a lot of nuances if you give it a new point of view. How much has changed in the German-speaking musical scene and how hard will it be for the big long run productions now, if a mid-size repertoire theatre works easily on a level that just a few years ago was a privilege of the private theatres.