Meet Louisa Vilinne, the Singapore girl of Miss Saigon

MANILA – On Aug 15 – after 23 years – Miss Saigon will return to Singapore at Sands Theatre at Marina Bay Sands.

The production is headlined by Filipino-Australian actress Abigail Adriano, with Australian-American actor Nigel Huckle as Chris.

And this time, it has a Singapore connection. Playing alternate Kim is Singaporean Louisa Vilinne, 27, who will relieve Adriano at least twice a week or on occasions when the latter is unavailable.

Vilinne, who made her professional musical debut on Miss Saigon’s international tour in 2023 and is also part of the Miss Saigon ensemble, relishes playing the character.

“Kim is one of the hardest roles in musical theatre because she is onstage from beginning till the end,” she tells The Straits Times in a backstage interview at The Theatre At Solaire in May, when Miss Saigon was staged in Manila, the Philippines.

Vilinne’s family tree has been a story of uprooting and a steely pursuit of a better life, much like the journey Kim had to undergo.

The actress’ family is originally from China. In the 1930s, when the country was struggling with economic turbulence, her great-grandparents migrated to Jakarta, Indonesia.

But they feared for their safety during the late 1990s, at the height of political tensions there. She remembers nothing of the stories of their struggles as she was still a toddler, except for what her engineer father would tell her.

Like the time they stood on the rooftop and saw houses burning, or how they sat frozen stiff in their car because they had closed the door a smidgen too late and someone had forced their way in to rob them.

“That’s not a way to live,” she recalls him saying. By 1999, they left the capital to start a new life in Singapore.

The similarities between her family’s trajectory and Kim’s are not lost on Vilinne.

“One of the scenes in Miss Saigon that really resonates with me is when Kim makes the decision to uproot her life in Vietnam,” she says.

“She touches the ground and looks up. She thinks that’s the last time she’s going to be home. Then she gets up and turns back one more time with hope and determination in her eyes – that really hits home.”

Vilinne cherishes her time growing up in Singapore. She remembers going to a PAP pre-school when she was four. She attended Jing Shan Primary School, CHIJ St Nicholas Girls’ School (Secondary) and Ngee Ann Polytechnic, where she pursued a diploma in arts business management.

Once in a while, she would return to Indonesia to visit her extended family.

But as a child, she found it confusing: Her cousins there would refer to her as the “Singaporean cousin”, and in Singapore, she was called the “Indonesian girl”.

By the time she was an adult, she was bitten by the theatre bug. She did one semester of musical theatre at Lasalle College of the Arts and was also part of Singapore Repertory Theatre’s The Young Company. One highlight was being cast in the 2017 ensemble for Forbidden City: Portrait Of An Empress starring local singer-actress Kit Chan.

In 2019, Vilinne decided to pursue her passion in Australia, where she studied musical theatre at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide.

That meant leaving behind everything she knew and everyone she loved. But the most difficult part was convincing her mother – who works at a human resource agency for domestic helpers – that this was the future she wanted.

In a Stem-centric country – it stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics – like Singapore, a career in the arts seemed out of place.

Vilinne says: “My family’s really supportive, but it took a while to get there because, like any Asian Tiger mum, she wanted me to have a comfortable life where I didn’t have to worry about my next pay cheque. Unfortunately, that is exactly what being an actor is – not knowing when your next pay cheque will be if you don’t have a long contract.”

It was important to gain her mother’s approval, but Vilinne found it hard to broach the topic.

“I don’t ask for much, my mother would say, because I don’t want to be a bother. My parents had to work really hard to give me a good life in Singapore, that I didn’t feel comfortable asking,” she said.

Instead, the young woman diligently saved up and created excuses for why she needed an extra $10 to $20 so she could pay for singing lessons. When she was offered a partial scholarship to study at the University of Adelaide, her mother saw how important it was to her and agreed to let her go.

Getting to do homecoming performances in Singapore – she was last back in 2022 after graduating – is a dream come true for Vilinne. “I get emotional thinking about it.”

And she is hungry for local food too, which she misses. She recalls bingeing on a large serving of Yangzhou fried rice when she was homesick Down Under, barely one week in. She walked into a Cantonese restaurant and ordered the family-size plate, since it was the only serving size it had.

“You could feed three people with that, and I ate every grain of rice,” she says.

And what would be her first meal back home? It is a toss-up between butter crab, Hokkien mee and salted egg chicken rice. “If I have those, I’m all good.”

Miss Saigon

Where: Sands Theatre, Marina Bay Sands, 10 Bayfront Avenue
When: Aug 15 to Sept 22, various timings
Admission: Tickets at $60 to $250
Info: The show has an Advisory 16 rating. Go to str.sg/wRPN2