WE ARE ADORED! WE ARE LOVED!
The makers of Jesus Christ Superstar score again
with a rock opera about Argentina's Eva Perón
Horizon August 1978
by Norman Kolpas

England--and soon America--may never have seen anything quite like Evita, a show about a seemingly unlikely subject: Argentina's half-forgotten first lady Eva Perón. On the surface, Evita has everything any conventional musical worth its applause should have: catchy melodies and lyrics, stunning sets and costumes, a huge company of singers and dancers, plus the right mix of stars--some comfortably established, others dazzlingly new. It also has a plot perfect in its attention-grabbing simplicity, a classic rags-to-riches tale: 'local girl makes good, weds famous man,' in the words sung by its heroine.

But there the simplicity ends. Beneath the surface, María Eva Duarte de Perón was complexity personified. The illegitimate daughter of a poor farmer, Evita (the diminutive of Eva) scrambled for legitimacy, power, and wealth. She was an entertainer who slept her way to stardom; a mistress to a man twice her age, Juan Perón; a mastermind of his military coup. As the wife of President Perón from 1946 to 1952, the public Evita lavished money on the needy--while the private Evita amassed (some say misappropriated) a personal fortune of millions. Draped in designer dresses, furs, and jewels, she told her people, 'You too will have clothes like these one day'--and, as a symbol of the opportunity, won the adoration of the workers. Explaining 'justicicialsm' a euphemism for Perón's fascism, she claimed that 'the object is to end class war'--and earned the loathing of the classes her husband was simultaneously silencing, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering.

After Eva's tragic--some would say fortunate--death of cancer at the age of 33, many considered her 'Santa Evita;' others a latter-day Lady Macbeth. But initially only three people conceived of her as the subject not merely of history, not simply of a musical, but of an opera--and a rock opera at that.

Evita is the work of what may be the most impressive transatlantic trio in theatre history. Tim Rice (lyricist) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (composer), the English wunderkind who eight years ago created a smash with Jesus Christ Superstar, persuaded Harold Prince, one of Broadway's undisputed rulers, to direct an original British musical in London for the first time in his career. Following Superstar's triumph, Rice and Lloyd Webber had been slightly daunted by the thought of writing a successor--how do you follow an act like Christ's? But in 1973 Rice unexpectedly stumbled on the answer when he heard on his car radio the last ten minutes of a BBC documentary about Eva Perón. Intrigued, he enlisted Lloyd Webber to collaborate on an Eva opera. Repeating their Superstar strategy, they released a record first--as a way of testing public reaction before risking a stage production. By 1976 the double album Evita was out; within months its beautiful six-minute-long ballad, 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina,' was a prize-winning hit single in Britain and almost everywhere else--except in America, where Rice says promotion was flimsy, and in Argentina, where Evita was banned.

As staging began, the London press rashly predicted Evita would be the exception to the British musical's singular aptitude for spectacular failure. In the wake of such ballyhoo, box office advance exceeded $500,000 by opening night this past June 21. Financially the show couldn't fail. What mattered now was artistic success.

'Evita--a musical extraordinary,' 'The very best of British,' ran the next day's headlines. The opera was a hit.

Evita is a sophisticated work whose score fuses modern dissonance with 19th-century romance, contemporary pop and rock with the more traditional idioms of Broadway show tunes, jazz and Latin American rhythm. Lloyd Webber develops a complex structure of evocative, recurring themes that are masterfully orchestrated and perfectly suited to Rice's tough and frequently witty--if occasionally banal--lyrics. Prince has fashioned a production that, in simple, bold visual strokes on a bare stage, supports, clarifies, and in some places reshapes the original work.

We're in a Buenos Aires movie theatre on July 26, 1952. On a huge screen suspended above the foot of the stage we watch, along with an onstage Argentine audience who face us, a cheap western that stars Evita herself. Suddenly the movie's sounds and images stutter and die, and there's an announcement that 'Eva Perón, spiritual leader of the nation, entered immortality at 20.25 hours today.' The screen sweeps to the rear of the stage, and the scene is transformed into Evita's funeral; the cinema fans turn into wailing mourners, while huge photographs of the actual event are projected above the action. Throughout the show this screen carries a photo-documentary commentary on the scenes below, keeping us ever aware of the gult between real life and death and the myths that are made of them for mass consumption.

To underscore that gap, on comes a long-haired, bearded, cigar-smoking young man wearing battle fatigues and a black beret. He is Che Guevara. In the only far-fetched conceit of the evening the Argentine-born revolutionary who was known for his role in Castro's coup but was never a political force in his own country, functions in the play as a symbol of resistance to dictators, which allows him to be a cynical narrator and critic of Eva Perón. He won't let us forget that there was a rotten core to the glamour of Evita: Instead of government we had a stage
Instead of ideas, a prima donna's rage
Instead of help we were given a crowd
She didn't say much but she said it loud.

Che leads us through a flashback account of Eva's brief life in a succession of scenes that--through Prince's engineering--change with cinematic swiftness. The sets by Timothy O'Brien and Tazeena Firth--at once simple, functional, and beautiful--aid the director all along the way, as does lighting by David Hersey that, from moment to moment, can evoke the flash-popping excitement of a mass rally or the somber danger of backroom politics.

In each scene a new facet of Eva's cunning and ambition is developed. One of the best-conceived numbers charts her rise to radio and film stardom, as she bids 'Goodnight and Thank You' to a succession of ever-more influential lovers. The song's staging uses a single silvery door that opens to let each lover out and then swings round to show Eva, each time more luxuriously clad, posing seductively on an upright mattress and singing in mock innocence, 'Oh but it's sad when a love affair dies.'

Eva's ascension is expertly counter-pointed with Perón's rise, which Prince trenchantly presents as a game of musical rocking chairs. Perón and his fellow jackbooted officers rock in military precision and sing about politics in a song called 'The Art of the Possible;' with each verse a chair and a man are removed, until only Perón remains.

Nor is care spared in presenting the people of Argentina. In a number hilarious in its breathtaking synchrony, which owes everything to the choreography of Larry Fuller, we meet the two major factions of Argentine society that oppose Eva: the military and the aristocracy. Each group, a tight phalanx, moves back and forth across the stage as a single body; the soldiers and aristocrats dance what amounts to a pas de deux of haughty exclusion that makes us sympathize with Eva's contempt for them.

Prince's staging makes a real, mighty force of Eva's followers, the descamisados, or 'shirtless,' whose support she won as much with her humble background, glamour, and inefficiently managed charities as with her more heartfelt fights for women suffrage and a minimum wage. In 'A New Argentina,' during which Evita convinces Perón to run for president, the descamisados gradually, almost imperceptibly, filter onto the stage, until--as if suddenly--they fill it with a power at once terrifying and inspiring.

All the strengths of Evita's staging coalesce in the high point of the opera, the hit number 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina,' which opens the second act. Perón, newly elected, addresses the masses from the balcony of the presidential mansion. The crowd below--some 30 actors so precisely directed that they seem like a mob--jumps and waves frantically and calls for Evita. Out she comes in a jewelled white tulle gown, to sing through tears:

And as for fortune, and as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired.

Suddenly the cheering crowd charges to the rear of the stage, the speaker's platform spins around, and we are inside the mansion with Eva and Perón. Out of the people's sight a calm, confident Evita declares:

Just listen to that!
The voice of Argentina!
We are adored! We are loved!

Below, Che is beaten up by Perón's heavies.

It is an awe-inspiring theatrical moment that shows off especially well the talents Hal Prince coaxed from his cast. Pop star and teenybopper idol David Essex, who gets top billing as Che, makes his character both harshly bitter and warmly likable. Stage actor Joss Ackland creates a strong-voiced, icily sinister Perón. But the chief triumph belongs to Elaine Paige, a little-known, five-foot-tall, 91-pound actress who won the starring role over 300 other hopefuls after Julie Covinington, who played Evita on the record, rejected the stage part to stay in Britain's National Theatre Company. Transforming herself from frumpy peasant into sensuous courtesan, then regal first lady, Paige suggests the multiple sides of Eva with striking immediacy. Critics unanimously declared her a smashing success.

A handful of reviewers complained that Evita is 'kindergarten history,' that it takes an ambivalent political stance and makes Eva too glamorous and Che Guevara too endearing. They may be right. But an attempt is made to present both sides of Eva and leave final judgements to the viewer. Facing the audience at the end of the show, Che sings, 'the choice is yours alone and no one else's.' Americans will have their own chance to choose next year, when Evita opens on Broadway.

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