A PUCCINI HEROINE CAPTIVATED BY HER OWN DREAM
The Times©, Thursday, June 22 1978
by Irving Wardle

In their quest for a new blockbusting hero, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber cannot have hoped to trump Jesus Christ, but they have come close to doing so with the person of Dona Maria Eva Duarte de Peron, who arose from an illegitimate peasant childhood to pile up the worldly treasures and power of a Cleopatra, and to usurp the place of the Virgin Mary with the Argentinian masses.

Just as Jesus Christ Superstar avoided religion, so Evita does its best to steer clear of politics. Eva Peron, as the authors have recently been loudly acknowledging, was a murky figure spurred on my a combination of fanatical ambition andd fanatical hatred of her country's conservative rich. She shot through her brief career protesting humble dedication to her beloved 'shirtless ones,' while combining with the Nazi-trained Peron in a ruthless policy of expropriation, censorship, and torture.

One can imagine a powerful political opera based on such a life. In fact, Monteverdi has already written it in The Coronation of Poppaea, that terrifying work showing two evil creatures climbing to the summit of power where they enter into a state of heavenly contentment.

Evita, however, is not a parable of this kind; its pretext is the glamour of the heroine's life, and the most revealing thing Mr. Lloyd Webber has to say about his subject is that 'Puccini would have adored her.'

Starting with the announcement of her death to a cinema audience, the piece proceeds in flashback, so that every episode we see is coloured by the requiem chorus of the first scene. We see Eva as a nondescript village girl picking up with a guitarist to escape to the capital; and then working through a queue of well-placed lovers until she finally nails Peron.

Not much is seen of her acting career, but the book telescopes a remarkable amount of material into wittily shaped numbers, in which Eva pitches out a succession of lovers through a revolving door, appearing each time in ritzier attire, and then Peron eliminates the opposition in a grave game of military musical chairs.

As a piece of story-telling, the piece is a feat of compression, often making its effect from simultaneous action as there is no time for chronological detail. And it is here that Harold Prince (making his British musical debut), most impressively brings his Broadway technique to the British stage. Take a mass number like that of Peron's election, with a wild crowd thundering out ostinato slogans for Joss Ackland's coldly smiling Peron, a group of truncheon-wielding thugs dragging off non-participants in the crowd, and Eva finally billowing on in white lace to sing and reduce them to rapt silence with 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.'

In life, Eva Peron played the role of a prima donna, and that is also what she does on Mr. Prince's stage. We see her arrogance, her vanity, even her failures (as on the last leg of her European 'Rainbow Tour'), but where other figures in the story are critically distanced, she goes through the ugly story up to her deathbed broadcast on her own terms as a Puccini heroine.

Elaine Paige's transformation in the role is one of the rewards of the evening; starting as a dumpy, mouse-haired little scold, acquiring the sumptuously voluptuous looks of a pampered courtesan, and taking on angular ascetic simplicity in her last phase. She handles the changes from public to private manner with shocking immediacy, and her voice fills the theatre like a whole brass section; most impressive of all, is the extent to which she shows Evita becoming totally captivated by her own dream.

I think the authors have miscalculated by including a sceptical narrator called Che to comment on the events. As played by David Essex, he is no match for Evita and his bubble-pricking remarks from the sidelines come over more as a concession to liberal opinion than as any genuine protest against the Peron regime.

He does, however, occupy a role comparable to Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, and receives the same kind of impassioned falsetto recitative. Otherwise, the score strikes me as Mr. Lloyd Webber's most integrated so far; endlessly reworking its material for contrasted occasions, and expanding motifs into instantly singable melodies. The style is not conspicuously Latin American, but it is drenched in the sense of Latin emotion. Finally a grateful word to David Hersey, whose lighting contributes so much to the atmospheric precision and vitality of Mr. Prince's spectacle.


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