EVITA: GLITTER OF EVIL...
The Times©, June 25 1978
by John Peter

Evita is a superb musical, but its heart is rotten. It is a glittering homage to a monster. Having been born and brought up under a totalitarian regime, I never cease to marvel at the sentimental fascination English people feel for political cannibals. Watching Evita (Prince Edward) is, in some ways, like looking at shop-windows selling Nazi uniforms and Japanese bayonets: they seem to cast a baleful spell on the curious innocents who never saw them in action.

This is a heavy opening; but Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber have written a serious musical. Consider its subject. Eva Peron was a grasping and utterly unscrupulous co-ruler of a near-Fascist dictatorship. She and Juan Peron were milder versions of Mussolini; they ruled by glamour, coercion, repression and torture. Like Hitler and Mussolini, they acquired a huge following among the dispossed by a brazen appeal to their sense of injustice and crude nationalism. ('Be a patriot; kill a Jew!' was an early slogan of the Peronistas.) Evita made herself obscenely rich by the sweat of her supporters; and they, even though the truth was beginning to sink in, worshiped her like a saint.

To be fair, Rice and Lloyd Webber don't try to gloss things over. But they've created a show which throbs and pulsates with the demonic energy of its heroine. As a piece of stagecraft, no, stage-art, this is one of the very best musicals London has seen in years. The music is immensely more interesting and sophisticated than that of Jesus Christ Superstar; its recurring themes weld it together into an echoing whole, and its moments of bleak dissonance hint at something sinister and inhuman.

Hint, mind you, and nothing more. Evil is the most difficult thing to communicate through music, and Lloyd Webber's pounding idiom, made up of rock, tango and ballad, is exhilarating, almost seductive. Evita would have approved.

Rice's libretto redresses the balance a bit. We do get a glimpse of Evita's greed and vulgarity (though nothing like the real thing); and those who know the record will notice that a few lines have been put in about the Perons' suppression of the free press. There's also a brief appearance by three trenchcoated, truncheon-carrying nasties, straight out of a forties cartoon. But I really don't know what to make of Rice's narrator: none other than Che Geuvara, played by David Essex as a ferrety, bearded urchin who is both a sardonic commentator and cheerleader.

The more you think about this bizarre device the more difficult it is to take the show seriously as it is asking to be taken. And it joins the long line of British musicals which have nothing to do with their own time. You're left with spectacle, and the spectacle is stunning. It marks the London debut of the legendary Harold Prince and it fully lives up to his reputation. Prince is one of the most cunning engineers of the theatre: his effects are simple but devestating and his clean, unfussy imagination is perfectly at home in Timothy O'Brien and Tazeena Firth's flexible, steely settings, suggesting space, vigour and wiry grandeur.

There is heroic work from Joss Ackland who does wonders with the one-dimensional role of Peron; and a most promising debut in the title role by Elaine Paige. On the evidence of this show I doubt if she could act to save her life; but she takes possession of the vast stage with huge vivacity and confidence. I don't know what she'd have done if she had to play the real Evita; but she's the true star of this show and this show remains a glamorous, sentimental fairy tale about a murderous Cinderella.


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