...AND SHIMMER OF ART
The Times©, June 25 1978.
by Derek Jewell

No man's art is an island; and so there are many things which almost anyone who looks, listens or reads must know about the magnificent, original, compelling Evita of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

Here, therefore, I declare a moratorium on particular superlatives, yet begin with others.

Evita, tracing the career of the charismatic but awful Eva Peron, is quintessentially about words and music. These, created and coalesced with genius by Rice, librettist, and Lloyd Webber, composer, are its heart and ensure that the work, staged or unstaged, is a masterpiece, as readers may recall has been my view since November 1976, when the record was unveiled.

It is, thus, with sounds--only minimally changed from the record--that my story begins, an order of priority intended in no sense to detract from the miraculous wand which has been waved over Evita by bluff Hal, the undisputed American Prince of musical directors, whose glittering lineage stretches back to West Side Story.

Evita is a quite marvellous modern opera, exceeding in stature even Jesus Christ Superstar. Lloyd Webber's score, so full of glorious melodies apart from the well-known 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina,' is an unparalleled fusion of 20th-century musical experience. Echoes of the past--Tchaikowsky, Puccini, and church choral music--shimmer hauntingly through. But it is the interweaving of pop, rock, jazz, Broadway, Latin and other elements which makes the brew so astonishingly potent.

As you listen, these ingredients become strikingly apparent. Is not the show's most perfectly constructed song 'Waltz for Eva and Che' in the Broadway tradition? Does not 'Buenos Aires' remind one of the Latinate explosions in West Side Story? And, whence springs 'Another Suitcase in Another Hall' except from the torchy rejection ballads of classic popular modern composers like our Cole Porters and Kerns?

Lloyd Webber is perhaps the most remarkable musical child of his generation. He has heard much, sensitively absorbed it, and produced his own completely original and personal synthesis.

In Tim Rice, he has a partner of perfection. Rice writes trenchant, witty, modern lyrics superbly married to Lloyd Webber's ambitious score--a score so skilfully orchestrated that I am amazed to have read elsewhere no comments yet upon this aspect, no tributes to those invisible musicians who play it so well under Anthony Bowles's direction. Criticism of musicals should begin with the music.

This, however, is not Wagner but modern opera in the tradition primarily of twentieth-century popular music. So one's enjoyment of the libretto is natural and easy. Practically every word of Rice's can be instantly savoured by the audience, Evita's excellent cast, their fine diction enhanced by microphones, can achieve meaning, nuances and subtlety which make it an opera for our time, satisfying our hunger for understanding.

Everything, too, is sung in Evita. No lumbering 'book' links it, but elegant and powerful recitative which continually points up character and sums up inevitably in brusque form Eva Peron's progression from bed to bed, ambition to megalomania.

That recitative also reminds one continually of the evils of the Peron dictatorship, its greed, the brutalities wreaked upon thousands of Argentinians. The word's printed with the original Evita record demonstrate this unmistakably, and the austere, somber stage version makes the message still clearer.

Which brings me to the sorcery of Harold Prince and the interaction of his supremely relevant stagecraft with the music--or rather, should have brought me to it--as well as to the wondrously revealed talents of Elaine Paige (Evita) and all the other facets of the artistic diamond which is Evita. To these things, I will return.


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