Miss Saigon sets West End record selling £4.4m tickets in a single day

The return of Miss Saigon to the London stage prompted the largest single day of sales in West End history on Monday.

Tickets for the smash hit musical went on sale at 10am, bringing in takings of £4.4million ahead of the curtain going up in May 2014 at the Prince Edward Theatre.

The box office took £2m in the first two hours. Sales smashed the previous West End record set by Book of Mormon, which took £2.1m in a day earlier this year.

Next year will mark Miss Saigon’s 25th anniversary. It first ran at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1989, closing in 1999 after more than 4,000 performances.

When it returns to London it will include a new song by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, who wrote Les Miserables, called Maybe. Miss Saigon tells the tragic story of a bar girl called Kim whose parents are killed in the Vietnam War. It is based on Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly.