EVITA, HICK GODDESS
The Guardian, July 2, 1978
by Michael Billington

After the ludicrous ballyhoo, there was a danger that the show itself would be an anti-climax. But the first thing to be said about Evita at the Prince Edward is that it is an audacious and fascinating musical that (following the current trend) dispenses entirely with a book to tell its story through music and lyrics. And if it brought the first night audience to its feet (as it did) then much of the credit belongs to the director, Hal Prince, who has staged the show with breathtaking inventiveness and quicksilver fluency.

My chief reservation, as with Jesus Christ Superstar, concerns the fact that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber adopt a tone of fence-sitting neutrality towards their protagonist. Hooked on style, they seem unconcerned with substance; and although at the end Che, a slightly improbable chorus, announces: 'I can't tell you what to say,' the truth is we haven't been given enough facts about Eva Peron during the show to decide whether she was a repellant power-maniac or a populist reformer. We watch her rise horizontally from small time Argentinian farmer's daughter to, in 1945, wife of Juan Peron but although Rice's lyrics do ample justice to her 'magic drive' she emerges more as a showbiz phenomenon than a woman of political nous. The legend is there all right; but not the calculating woman who traipsed round docks, factories, union offices to enlist votes for her husband.

But although the show seems rather apolically wide-eyed about stardom, it contains a beautiful score from Andrew Lloyd Webber full of strange inviolate sadness (just as memorable as the famous 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' is 'Another Suitcase in Another Hall' sung by Peron's discarded mistress). And Prince's staging is a miracle which every British musical director ought to go and study with notebook in hand. The setting (by Timothy O'Brien and Tazeena Firth) is a cavernous black box that looks as if it might have come from an RSC season of Roman plays; and Prince fills that box with all kinds of magic.

Take for instance, the scene on the balcony of the Casa Rosada when Peron is proclaimed President in front of a chanting, banner-waving mob. The ball-gowned Eva enters stage left, and processes along the flag-draped balcony like a puppet on castors; and after she has sung 'Don't Cry for Me' the crowd charges to the back of the stage, the dais bearing Eva and Peron swivels round to face them and so what we then see is the back view of these two tin gods. It is a marvelous piece of staging because it enables us to experience Eva's emotional impact on her audience and to see the gloating triumph with which she turns to her husband; in short, the public and the private face. Prince, aided by choreographer Larry Fuller, also makes the brilliant conceit of turning the Argentinian army into a stiff-jointed tight-knit phalanx who move across the stage like venemous toy soldiers on the march.

Prince has, in fact, treated the show as an emblematic spectacle: one that makes its points through images rather than ideas. And he has carried this idea through to the performances. Elaine Paige, who has a powerful voice, offers us not a multi-dimensional Evita but a series of lightning impressions: the hick in a print dress, the calculating lay, the mother figure, the travelling goddess with swept back hair. David Essex, whose lyrics could do with more subversive irony, nonetheless manages to register Che as a cynical observer. And both Joss Ackland's Peron and Siobhan McCarthy's mistress, a realistic waif, make their presences strongly felt. It is not, when all is said and done, a musical that tells one anything new. But its haunting score (which thanks to the LP, you go into the theatre whistling) and its superb abrasive, imagistic direction make it an experience that compensates for many wasted nights spent watching British musicals.



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