(FORTUNE Magazine) – Is it ever legitimate to pronounce judgment on a theatrical work not actually seen by the pronouncer? Your correspondent's answer is yes, as indeed it has to be for purposes of this item, in which he will eventually get around to blasting Miss Saigon, a show he has every intention of never attending. The blast represents a minority perspective, since the production in question, which premiered a year ago in London, was instantly heralded as a miracle of stagecraft and is repeatedly stated to have sold $25 million worth of ducats in advance of its still-unscheduled Broadway opening. The play, about the seamy underside of Saigon during the Vietnam War, is already famous here in Gotham for a titanic row it generated in the city's ) liberal community. The row featured the competing claims of two lofty principles. On one side was ''artistic freedom,'' as embodied in producer Cameron Mackintosh's demand that he be allowed to hire whichever actor he deemed best for the leading male role. To play this part -- that of a Eurasian whorehouse operator catering to a mostly G.I. clientele -- Mackintosh insisted on Jonathan Pryce, an established star of Welsh extraction (who has been playing the part in London). The competing claim was that of affirmative action, and it led Actors' Equity to demand that the part go to an Asian American. The union ultimately backed down, and Mackintosh got his man. Was his cause just? Progressive opinion here in town seems to have regarded it as a close call. Opined the invincibly highminded New York Times: ''All who love theater can rejoice in a victory for artistic freedom. But protesters who demanded more opportunity for Asian performers can be satisfied too; their legitimate complaint has now been heard worldwide.'' We have a question: What is it about theatrical performers that differentiates them from other workers when affirmative action is an issue? Why does a producer in search of a pimp portrayer get so much more deference than other employers when he insists on an absolute right to hire whomever he views as best for the job? The answer that would be supplied by most affirmative-actionists is not hard to figure out. They view actors, and especially stars, as unique talents. Elsewhere in the world of work, they view employees as basically interchangeable -- as divided merely into the qualified and the unqualified. In defending the proposed civil rights act of 1990, widely criticized as an engine of quota creation, the Times says it protects ''the rights of workers who are qualified.'' But workers are not interchangeable, and ''qualified'' is not the same as ''best available.'' Workers performing the same jobs differ enormously in productive ability. That conclusion, long since reached by the present writer via inductive reasoning, is meticulously documented in a remarkable 1990 study led by industrial psychologists John E. Hunter of Michigan State and Frank L. Schmidt of the University of Iowa. Working with a diverse group of employment databases, Hunter and Schmidt demonstrated that productive differences were greatest in ''high-complexity'' jobs (e.g., managers and professionals) but were observable and significant even among semiskilled and unskilled workers. Taking all such ''low-complexity'' jobs together, the top 1% of workers were about 50% more productive than average workers -- and about three times as productive as the bottom 1%. Employers settling for the merely qualified (as the new civil rights bill would often force them to) incur significant costs. In the case of Miss Saigon, your servant was admittedly less exercised than usual about employer rights, since the employer's product seems uniquely nonmeritorious. The point of view of the show is scornfully anti-American. We reach this conclusion on the basis of political triangulation. Conservatives like William Safire (the New York Times's lonely conservative, who reviewed the show from London) and Hilton Kramer have expressed dismay about Miss Saigon's political perspective, and British critics divided along political lines: The conservative Telegraph was dismissive, the liberal Guardian ecstatic.

We have personally inspected the lyrics. In the show-stopping number near the play's end, a song called ''The American Dream,'' the pimp tells you straight out that his own depraved values are America's. (''Men like me there have things easy, / they have a lawyer and a bodyguard. / To the johns there I'll sell blondes there / that they can charge on a card. / What's that I smell in the air? / The American dream.'') You can see it all for yourself, probably next spring, for up to $100 per ticket.