Theater reviewer Gibbs Cadiz interviews actor-producer Monique Wilson, here for a break from London for the opening of New Voice Company’s Into the Woods.

Among other things, the conversation delves into her reasons for staging Into the Woods, her experience working with New Voice, whether she would choose actors who can sing versus singers who can act, and the responsibility of artists onstage (“It’s someone else’s life out there we’re depicting”).

Monique, who alternated as Kim with Lea Salonga in the London production of Miss Saigon, was asked, “Can you imagine yourself doing Miss Saigon again?”

She answers, “No, I’m too old! I think there’s a time and place for everything. If I was gonna try and direct it, that might be an interesting thing to do.”

Asked how she would reinterpret Miss Saigon if she were to direct it, Monique says:

I would be more conscious of the reality of the Asian women onstage. In my time, 1989, and no offense to anyone who did the show, we were also not politicized ourselves. We thought bar girls loved what they were doing and they were just dancing to hook up with guys. . .

Later on, we started doing Vagina Monologues and I got older and I became a feminist and I became more politicized, I started to realize that these women are doing these things for economic reasons. They’re not there to enjoy themselves. That gives you a much deeper context of the lives of these women who are in that kind of profession, like prostitution . . . Of course when we’re 18 or 19, we don’t see that . . .

So if I was to have my hands on Miss Saigon now, maybe directorially, I would give more weight to that: what drives a woman to do that in the first place and not to romanticize or glamorize this desire to wed a GI or a white man . . . I think Hollywood has romanticized that so much. It’s not as romantic as it sounds . . .

Sometimes there probably would have been real love there, but there would have been a huge need also. . . .

Watch part one (18 minutes long) of Gibbs’ interview with Monique here.