The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, but in the case of Miss Saigon, a picture inspired thousands of words, musical notes, and performances.

According to Jennifer Paz, who plays the heroine, Kim, in the production of Miss Saigon that opens Tuesday in the Stranahan Theater, composer Claude-Michel Schonberg got ideas for the show from a magazine

“It was a photograph of a Vietnamese woman, and she was saying good-by to her child at the airport,” Paz said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. The boy’s father, an American stationed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, had learned of the child and wanted to provide a better life for him, so the mother chose to give the boy up and was looking at him for probably the last time. “That image just struck [Schonberg], it just moved him so much he found a way to write this play,” she said.

The original production became a collaboration among Frenchmen Schonberg and Alain Boublil, who knew a thing or two about putting together a musical.

With the help of producer Cameron Mackintosh, their earlier work, Les Miserables, based on the Victor Hugo novel of the French Revolution, had become a megahit. Mackintosh reteamed with Schonberg and Boublil, along with lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr., for the musical about the Vietnam War, which opened in London in 1989, then on Broadway in 1991 where it ran for almost a decade.

Miss Saigon, which also borrows elements from Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, takes place in 1975, in the days before the fall of Saigon.

With the death of her family, Kim, a young woman, has no way to provide for herself and is forced into prostitution. On her first night in a sleazy Saigon bar, she meets Chris, a young Marine who is trying to forget the horrors of war and a growing sense of danger as the Viet Cong forces advance toward the city. Chris and Kim fall in love, and the few days they have together are almost idyllic. But in the chaos of the fall of Saigon, the pair are parted.

Three years later, after he has married his American fiance, Chris learns that Kim bore him a son, and they have escaped to Bangkok.

Paz said Kim is a wonderful character. “I originated this role in the first national tour, and it’s refreshing to come back and play it again, because it’s just deep; the music alone is gorgeous material for a singer. It’s very challenging.”

What wasn’t as much of a challenge was understanding her character. Paz said she pulled a lot from her personal experiences to create Kim.

“We emigrated from the Philippines in 1978 when I was 5 years old,” she said, adding that although she never actually experienced fighting, living in the Philippines was like living through a civil war every day.

Her college-educated parents found work in Seattle right away, but it was still very hard to leave behind family and friends and everything they had ever known.

“That was really hard for them; they had to sacrifice that to give their children a better life. And that’s one of the themes in Miss Saigon, other than a love story between Kim and Chris, that really resonates for me,” she said. “The themes of self-sacrifice, the mother sacrificing for her child, and the themes of love, and losing love. All those things are so touching, and it’s easy to connect with them as a performer and as a person watching the show.”

Although it might be easy to dislike the character of Chris, who left the pregnant Kim behind, it doesn’t happen that way, Paz said.

“That time was so confusing for both the Marines and for the women and the families of the Vietnam War,” she said. “By the time you meet Chris, he is just so frustrated ... so lost in this world. He’s not really a victim, just confused with what he has to do in his duties and seeing innocent lives being destroyed. Kim meets him in such a situation where they are both so lost and they find a real connection.

“They find love, true love, I believe, and then of course the fall of Saigon, this American GI was pulled, lifted from his love by no choice of his own. So I think they’re both victims of very unfortunate circumstances.

They’re two people who really just want to be with each other, but can’t.” Alan Gillespie plays the role of Chris, and Paz says he’s fabulous: “Powerful voice, very sweet; we’re having a great time finding each other’s characters.”

As in all of Mackintosh’s productions, the original show sported a big mechanical gimmick. Cats had a big tire rising out of the stage, The Phantom of the Opera featured the falling chandelier, and in Miss Saigon, a helicopter landed on the roof of the American embassy.

For the current tour, Miss Saigon has been reworked to fit in smaller theaters - sorry, Toledo, no helicopter - but Paz says she likes the changes. “The material, textually speaking, it’s all the same,” she said. “It’s just a scaled-down version so it can fit in more houses across the country.

By any standards, it’s still a big-scale Broadway musical, but the helicopter is projected on a giant screen. Instead of a [real] Cadillac, images of the American dream are projected on a screen, and I think in that regard, you really get more of a sense of the story.”

There’s still a lot to see, however. For one thing, the sets have changed. Instead of a flat stage, there are many different levels, with staircases and other elements to lend physical depth to the proceedings.

“I saw this version in Long Beach, Calif.,” Paz said. “I saw so many different nuances with the story telling, and just the shift in emphasizing different things made it so much more interesting. And I think it allows for the performer to play more. It’s more fulfilling as a performer, not to be competing with the scenery.”

Miss Saigon was the first major role for Paz. “I actually left school to do the show,” she said. “It was an amazing opportunity - I was a theater major [at the University of Washington] - and it was either finish the theater program or get to play this dream role. So I toured with the first national tour for 31/2 years.”

After that, she appeared in Les Miserables on Broadway, then went to Singapore, where she starred in The Fantasticks with Kay Cole (choreographer), who was the original Maggie in A Chorus Line.

She was in the original Los Angeles cast of the 2001 revival of Flower Drum Song, which she also called an amazing experience. Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang adapted the work and shifted its tone so that it was more in keeping with C.Y. Lee’s original novel about conflicts between first and second generations of Chinese Americans in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

“It was really a monumental piece in that it was the first time that the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization allowed someone to take one of their pieces and re-adapt it. They’re very, very strict with keeping their material intact, so for them to have allowed Hwang to take their piece and sort of dust it off and say go ahead, breathe new life into it and give it a more accurate point of view from an Asian-American experience was fascinating,” Paz said.

The play featured Lea Salonga, who starred in the original Miss Saigon, Paz said. At first Paz was in awe of the veteran actress - “Getting to sit back and listen to her sing was absolutely fabulous for me” - but they soon became friends and Paz even got some insight to Salonga’s version of Kim. “This role [Kim] is just so vocally demanding, and it was just really refreshing to learn that she [Salonga] also had challenges with this role. Besides, it’s always nice to get to work with your colleagues, with people you’ve admired in the business, to get to work with them again or to get to meet them for the first time, it’s always so fulfilling on so many levels as an artist and as a professional.”

Paz said this version of Miss Saigon is also fulfilling. Previous productions were more about the spectacle than the plot, she said. Now audiences really pay attention to the people and their stories.

“And really, for me both as a performer and as an audience member, that’s really what you go to theater for, to go on that journey and really feel what [the characters] are going through.

“I think if people come to this show just because they want to see helicopters, I’m in big trouble. Come for the story telling and come for the fabulous performances,” she said.

Miss Saigon opens Tuesday for eight performances in the Stranahan Theater, 4645 Heatherdowns Blvd. Performances are 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, and 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets range from $36 to $45 and are available from Ticketmaster, 419-474-1333, or the Stranahan box office. Information: 419-381-8851.

Questions? Email gwangung@u.washington.edu