The musical was premièred at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, back in 1989, closing after 4,092 performances in 1999. It opened on 
Broadway at the Broadway Theatre on April 11, 1991, and subsequently played in many other cities and embarked on tours. Prior to the opening of the 2014 London revival, it was claimed that Miss Saigon had set a world record for opening day ticket sales, with sales in excess of £4m (over 5-million US dollars) reported.
It is based on Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, and similarly tells the tragic tale of a doomed romance involving an Asian woman abandoned by her American lover. The setting of the plot is relocated to 1970s Saigon during the Vietnam War, and Madame Butterfly's story of marriage between an American lieutenant and a geisha is replaced by a romance between a United States Marine and a seventeen-year-old South Vietnamese bargirl. The creator's of the musical are Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, with lyrics by Boublil and Richard Maltby, Jr.