Those who understand "Evita" may find it easy afterward to understand her descamisados, the people themselves, who will never feel themselves to be more important than they are.
--Eva Perón
La razón de mi vida

After 1952, U.S. news coverage of the affairs of Argentina and Juan Perón consisted of the news of his fall from power, exile from the country and a few scattered reports about Eva's body having been located after being hidden for years and returned to Perón, his return to power in Argentina in 1972, his election as president in 1973 and death in 1974. Outside of her native land, interest in Eva seemed in about as much evidence as her beautifully preserved body.

This apathy was discovered by an Argentine-born filmmaker in Britain, Carlos Pasini, when he tried to sell his documentary Evita, Queen of Hearts. Thames Television eventually bought it and aired it in 1972.

Meanwhile, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber had become superstars themselves with the controversial rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar and the musical theatre world anxiously awaited their next project. One day in 1973, fate intervened when Tim Rice turned on his car radio: "I was driving to dinner somewhere in London and I just happened to hear the end of a radio program about Eva Perón. I thought it was rather interesting and I called the station a few days later and they told me there was a recent television documentary about her which somehow I'd missed. After I'd seen it, I thought it could be a rather good idea to follow up Superstar."

Andrew wasn't so keen on the idea and pursued his idea of turning the beloved stories of P.G. Wodehouse's butler character into a musical, Jeeves, which Tim didn't feel was right for him. So Tim went to Argentina, where he tried to soak up the atmosphere of Buenos Aires. He didn't dare do any significant research--"[Eva was] still a touchy subject down there. Even Superstar ran into trouble. When they tried to put it on, right-wing extremists blew up the theatre the night before. After that, I don't worry too much about the critics."

THE CONCEPT ALBUM (1976)
Just as Tim feared, Jeeves did turn out to be a disastrous idea and the show hung on for just over a month. Andrew, having failed on his own, came back to Tim and they settled down to work on Evita. Tim didn't realize he was plunging right into a controversy that would equal the one that surrounded Superstar. "I was like many people, fooled by her to begin with. When I first began reading about her, I thought 'what a fantastic woman.' So to begin with, I just thought this was an amazing lady. The more I got into it, just like the people of Argentina--the more they got into it, the more they found out she was rather a murky character. By that time, we'd written half the show, but it became more interesting.

By the summer of 1976, Evita was finished. Tim and Andrew put on a multi-media presentation of their new show in a converted chapel on Andrew's estate (which has subsequently been used to try out all Lloyd Webber's shows). The reaction was favorable, so they decided to commit it to record, as they had with Superstar, but for rather different reasons. Rice explains: "A hit single before the show was a sort of marketing wheeze which happened by accident in the case of Superstar because we were desperately keen to write a show. We always felt we were theatre writers rather than record writers. And in fact, nowadays, the kids who buy records wouldn't touch us with a barge pole. With Superstar, we were desperate to get somebody to put it on as a show and nobody would. The only contacts we had that were interested at all were guys in the record business. It was a record company, MCA Records, that backed us and they said 'you can put out one single,' and that did quite well, and then the album.

The whole thing worked so well, by accident, that we thought, let's try it again with Evita. Let's test the market with the songs, because if your songs are no good, you probably won't have a hit show."

They needed a big song for Evita and they had the tune, but the lyrics weren't quite working. Andrew had written what Tim felt was a superb melody. Lloyd Webber says, "What I liked about it was the possibility that we could change her mood, seeing she'd won the crowd with a soft sell, she could suddenly become a vicious sort of vixen; it's a very manipulative piece of theatre writing."

Tim supplied lyrics with the working title "It's Only Your Lover Returning" to signify Eva's return from her Rainbow Tour of Europe and to convey her feelings toward the people of her country. This is the first verse as first recorded:

It's only your lover returning
The truth is I never left you
All through my wild days
My mad existence
I kept my promise
Don't keep your distance Everyone felt the first line didn't work, so Tim replaced it with "All through my crazy and wild days," but that didn't work either. Tim finally took a line he'd used in the funeral scene and the song became "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina." With the rest of the verse, it really didn't make sense, but somehow that didn't matter; it worked.

"Another Suitcase in Another Hall," the plaintive song Perón's mistress sings after Eva throws her out, was supposed to be the hit single from Evita. Nobody dreamed "Argentina" would catch on. Elaine Paige, who was the first Eva on stage remembered: "It was four-and-a-half minutes long! Certainly in the pop element, which was where we all first knew this song, that was extraordinary and it was a ballad...to have a ballad that's four-and-a-half minutes long was pretty unusual. I also think the title caught everyone's imagination."

To speak for the opposition to the Peróns, Rice and Lloyd Webber used a narrator, just as they had in Joseph and Superstar, and they called him Ché, which is the Argentine equivalent of the American "Mac" or "hey, you." He didn't come to represent the real Che Guevara until later.

After the recording sessions, Rice and Lloyd Webber contacted American director Hal Prince. Early in the 70s, Prince had tried unsuccessfully to acquire the rights to Superstar and had also sent Andrew a sympathetic telegram after Jeeves flopped. Andrew and Tim had taken some demo tapes of Evita to Prince's house in Spain the year before; Prince had responded with a lengthy critique but never heard back, so he forgot about it.




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