History YMMV / MissSaigon

* FridgeHorror: If you think Chris was going through hell before--having nightmares/grappling with his troubled marriage/struggling with guilt over inadvertently abandoning Kim--what's he going to be like ''now''? Especially bad considering that he was making strides towards putting his life together.

* AmericansHateTingle: People on both sides of the war (refugees/immigrants and mainlanders) have criticized the show. Most of the criticism revolves around the portrayal of Vietnam being a WretchedHive, the sexism, and racism (Orientalism). Refugees and immigrants dislike the [[https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/04/13/i-am-miss-saigon-and-i-hate-it/ exploitation]] of their personal and communal trauma. Mainlanders object to the portrayal of the communists as a [[YourTerroristsAreOurFreedomFighters sweeping, evil army]] (for example, the comparison of Ho Chi Minh [[note]] considered a national hero in mainland Vietnam[[/note]] to [[Literature/NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]] during "Morning of the Dragon"). It's also plagued with an extensive amount of errors regarding the Vietnamese culture and language, as well as allegations of InterchangeableAsianCultures in the lack of Vietnamese actors in principal roles (the original Broadway/West End Engineer, Jonathan Pryce, is a white man wearing {{Yellowface}} to play an Eurasian character, and the most notable principal Kims have been Filipinas Lea Salonga and Eva Noblezada).

* JerkassWoobie: The Engineer is as scummy as they come, but much like the other Vietnamese, his life is far from enviable. He's also implied to have faced discrimination over his mixed race, and we can tell from his backstory that he wound up the way he is partially because he needed to do anything he could to survive in his rough, fatherless upbringing. His dream of America is also strangely pitiful. He makes it clear he'll continue to be a reprehensible individual if he makes it there, but given his awful surroundings, it' easy to understand why he wants to ditch his current home for something better. Also sad is how [[spoiler: he's lead to believe he'll finally have his dream come true only to shortly have it crushed]].

* NarmCharm: The musical can fall prey to this trope yet it's still utterly fantastic, watchable and will probably have you sobbing at the end. Chris is sometimes the most/only narmy one, especially during the song "Why God, Why?"; even its title sounds narmy. It also depends on how well he can pull off that BigNo at the end. Some actors are terrific, others have you stifling your laughter or even cringing.

* QuestionablCasting: Given it's not always the easiest process getting West End actors over to Broadway, some questioned the decision to make that move for Alistair Brammer as Chris in the revival, as he was neither a big name nor giving a particularly well received performance, unlike fellow major cast members Eva Noblezada (Kim), Jon Jon Briones (the Engineer), and Rachelle Ann Go (Gigi), who weren't famous, but had been acclaimed for their work in London.

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: Did Thuy want to kill Tam because of who his father was... or because Tam was [[IfICantHaveYou a reminder that someone else took Kim's virginity?]]
** As noted in the revival, the new characterization of Thuy is much more sympathetic than the original, for good reason. Kim is explicitly the only family Thuy has left after a war he's been fighting in, so it's easy to wonder if his DisproportionateRetribution of trying to kill Tam might be because like Chris, he's suffering unknown/untreated PTSD and making terrible decisions because of it. But thanks to the original story's racism, [[ProtagonistCenteredMorality Thuy didn't get any sympathy for it.]]
** Asian-Americans have also noted that Thuy is suffering a major case of being the DesignatedVillain, since [[MortonsFork none of his choices are actually "good."]] From his perspective, his fiancee got forced into prostitution and had sex with an American soldier. After the Fall of Saigon, she waits a whole year naively thinking that Chris is COMING BACK FOR HER, so Thuy is most likely trying to tell her that ThisIsReality and [[CaptainObvious there are plenty of half-white and fatherless children running around.]] When Thuy tries to separate Kim from her "true love," he's seen as an uptight, repressed Asian stereotype... but if he [[DefiledForever rejected her as "damaged goods,"]] it's likely that the writers would ''still'' have portrayed him as an uptight and repressed Asian stereotype, just for different reasons.

** It's not just him: consider what Tam's life is going to be like. His mother had to [[spoiler: kill herself to force his father to take him and raise him in America, his stepmother flat-out doesn't want him, and he probably won't have any memory of his real mother at all.]] And even though things were bad for ''bui doi'' in Vietnam (case in point: Thuy trying to stab Tam [[DisproportionateRetribution for existing)]], America wasn't exactly free of HalfBreedDiscrimination at the time either. This kid's most likely got a rough life ahead of him.

* JerkassWoobie: The Engineer is as scummy as they come, but much like the other Vietnamese, his life is far from enviable. He's also implied to have faced discrimination over his mixed race, and we can tell from his backstory that he wound up the way he is partially because he needed to do anything he could to survive in his rough, fatherless upbringing. His dream of America is also strangely pitiful. He makes it clear he'll continue to be a reprehensible individual if he makes it there, but given his awful surroundings, it' easy to understand why he wants to ditch his current home for something better. Also sad is how [[spoiler: he's lead to believe he'll finally have his dream come true only to shortly have it crushed.]]

* WTHCastingAgency: Given it's not always the easiest process getting West End actors over to Broadway, some questioned the decision to make that move for Alistair Brammer as Chris in the revival, as he was neither a big name nor giving a particularly well received performance, unlike fellow major cast members Eva Noblezada (Kim), Jon Jon Briones (the Engineer), and Rachelle Ann Go (Gigi), who weren't famous, but had been acclaimed for their work in London.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: In relation to the opera it's based on. While this show has also been criticized for troublesome stereotypes, it's ending has been regarded as an improvement. Originally [[spoiler: the equivalent of Kim kills herself because she can't be with her love.]] Here the action makes her seem like less of a lovestruck idiot, as [[spoiler: she still commits suicide, but here she does so because her child is initially not accepted by Chris and Ellen. By killing herself, she's really making a HeroicSacrifice to ensure that Tam will have to be taken in by his father and stepmother.]]

* AmericansHateTingle: People on both sides of the war (refugees/immigrants and mainlanders) have criticized the show. Most of the criticism revolves around the portrayal of Vietnam being a WretchedHive, the sexism, and racism (Orientalism). Refugees and immigrants dislike the [[https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/04/13/i-am-miss-saigon-and-i-hate-it/ exploitation]] of their personal and communal trauma. Mainlanders object to the portrayal of the communists as a [[YourTerroristsAreOurFreedomFighters sweeping, evil army]] (for example, the comparison of Ho Chi Minh [[note]] considered a national hero in mainland Vietnam[[/note]] to [[Literature/NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]] during "Morning of the Dragon"). It's also plagued with an extensive case of CriticalResearchFailure regarding the Vietnamese culture and language, as well as allegations of InterchangeableAsianCultures in the lack of Vietnamese actors in principal roles (the original Broadway/West End Engineer, Jonathan Pryce, is a white man wearing {{Yellowface}} to play an Eurasian character, and the most notable principal Kims have been Filipinas Lea Salonga and Eva Noblezada).

* CriticalResearchFailure:
** The phrase "bụi đời" means vagrants, street children, or simply homeless people/homelessness. Act 2 has the song "Bui Doi", in which it's used as a specific term for the Amerasian children of Vietnamese mothers and American GI fathers. Due to PopculturalOsmosis, the term Bui-Doi is now in common use to refer to these children but only in the West. It never had any racial connotations in Vietnamese - the equivalents for what the lyricists meant are ''con lai'' ("mixed-race child(ren)"), ''người lai'' ("mixed-race adult(s)"), or, specifically, "Mỹ lai" ("American mixed-race").
** "Tranh" is not a stage name a bar girl would pick. It's considered a "provincial", "peasant" name. "Trang" is more likely what the writers were aiming for.
** There are no logical InUniverse reasons for the bar girls, all native speakers, to sing pseudo-Vietnamese gibberish during the wedding. Vietnam has a long tradition of music, ranging from folk songs to courtly entertainment.