Conducted August 24, 1979, Orpheum Theatre, San Francisco, California

ON PLAYING PERÓN

In Evita, Bob has the theory that the subtext and antecedent action regarding any character, normally given to the audience by the actor, is here supplied by the staging. He calls it "pure [Hal] Prince legerdemain."

Therefore, the actors can key their performances as they would in a Greek tragedy (he cites Oedipus specifically) with no need to establish who or what they are, can then be what they feel. "We can be what we sing."

"You must steer the characterization. It is more than just a pastiche; it’s really a very well thought-out, choreographed—not in terms of dance but as in the elements welded together to capture the spirit of Peronism) show. Peronism had a lot to do with hype, personality and the cult of the personality.

I knew about the show for a long time before I even thought I might have a crack at auditioning for a part in it, and I never realized until we opened in Los Angeles the kind of impact this show has. It is a cumulative one because it was only after I read and then saw a film of these two people in front of the Casa Rosada, and heard people talking about her—actual people, not historians—but the descamisados as well as the oligarchs, and hearing their kind of gut-level, inarticulate response to Peronism and especially to Evita, informed me that this show, however you may like it or not like it, has given me a breath of what that was all about.

The strange thing is, somebody griped about the fact that the nuts and bolts of the story is really not there. The choice that the creators made is, ‘Okay, we go disconnectedly, disjointedly from one high spot in her life to the next.’ No connective tissue; only the slightest bow to connecting one event to the other. Most of the time, there is no transition whatever. I think that if you had told this story in a more conventional musical form, it would have been a flat and largely unbelievable story.

You see, there was no way to explain the impact the Peróns had. You have to create the impact. This show, with its theatrical punch, metaphorically recreates the theatrical punch that the real people had for their people. And even the disparity of opinion is, in a way, fitting, because that’s sort of what happened there too. The people loved her, the descamisados, and the oligarchs were completely revolted by the whole notion of this whore, waterfront trollop (or whatever they made her out to be) up there next to their president.

I’ve met, especially in Los Angeles, Argentine people of both persuasions (but very few bourgeoisie) either well-educated people who got out very early or, more recently here in San Francisco, two 18- or 19-year-old kids who went to London to see the show and smuggled a couple of albums back to Buenos Aires and happened to be traveling in this country and came by and saw the show. They didn’t live during that time [of the Peróns] but they were there for Perón’s return. It was just like us talking about [Franklin] Roosevelt. I was born just before he died, and feel I have a touch with the Roosevelt years and the depression. I really feel an emotional connection to it, and these kids did with their own history. They received from their parents the same kind of emotional information that we do, about the people in their past, and they have a very strong feeling about Evita.

One night in Los Angeles, I came down after 11 p.m.. I’m always the last one out of there because I have to wash all that garbage off my face. Well, there were six people, actually three couples, very well-dressed, continental, waiting. The women looked straight out of Paris Match, expensive but extremely good taste, and they did not look Hispanic at all. When I noticed accents, I figured France or maybe northern Italy, and they weren’t kids, but looked in their late 30s or early 40s. As I walked through the door there, by the guard’s desk, they all kind of stepped back. They were obviously waiting for someone and I knew I was the last one out, so I nodded and smiled. One of the men came up and kind of lingered behind me. He said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Gunton,’ introduced himself and the rest and said, ‘We just want to tell you how much we enjoyed the musical until you came on.’ I thought to myself, ‘Holy shit! He waited a half hour to tell me how I ruined the show for him, right?’ I guess my smile faded and he said, ‘No, no, you see, all six of us are from Argentina, and we all grew up during the Peronist era. We were watching the show and then we say you come on. Not only did you look like him—which we expected—but when you gave that speech, you sounded just like him and you walked like he did.’

Now, in my first scene, the ‘Charity Concert,’ I’m wearing those tall cavalry boots that Perón wore because he was a cavalry officer, and because of them, there is a certain way you have to walk. There’s less mobility, and a stiff-leggedness plus, in wearing a uniform, you carry yourself in a particular way. Also, part of it is just how I imagined someone with that power, and yet being clumsy, as he was, and his arms were too short for his body. He was also short-legged and all this. Also, there’s the quasi-fascist mode, almost goose-stepping in a laid back way—so, in other words, my walk is determined to a great extent by what I’m wearing as well as in my imagination, but so was his.

Here’s another example: some people comment on how similar the smile is, or they get the feeling it is. The reason is that I looked at pictures of Perón smiling and I noticed in several of them that I could see his tongue pressed behind his teeth. I worked for weeks to try and make the broadest smile possible in my face, and when you are smiling from here [below the bridge of the nose] down, without your eyes--in other words, when you’re smiling and it doesn’t come from within—you need to prop your tongue against your teeth to lock your jaw into a smile. This tells me that Perón, with his tongue behind his teeth, also had to lock his jaw like I did as an actor to create that smile, because it wasn’t a smile that came from any place natural. It was pasted on the way Richard Nixon’s was pasted on.

These things where life imitates art and life comes back and talks to art, I find fascinating, and they’re forever happening with this show. Part of it is because I just look a little bit like him, especially with make-up, but also the impact of this show is almost a metaphor for their (the Peróns) impact, and there’s a lot of this cross-breeding because we’re dealing in the same kind of eliciting of emotions. I mean, we’re acting, but another thing you could say we’re doing is being phony. I’m not being Bob Gunton out there. That’s my job as an actor, to create a character.

I think Eva to a lesser extent was so driven that she would have been the way she was no matter what. If she didn’t have jewels, she’d be modeling whatever she had that was the best she could find. So when she was acting, it was only in those media moments, but it was her personality that was there all the time. Whereas, with Perón, in view of his pedophilia—even with his regal bearing, he was an actor personality, enthroning himself and trying to ‘create’ himself as a character. He was called the ‘Argentine Superman’ by some people. Even with his terrible acne scars and everything, he was looked upon as a terribly attractive man, and he used it. His profile shots in magazines, like John Barrymore, and he probably traded on the macho thing that a big nose meant you were well endowed elsewhere. I’m sure he wasn’t above any of that at all.

So I’m playing an actor playing someone who is playing someone. It’s terrific. I get an opportunity in the staging to do that. In a way, even though Perón is an adjunct character in the general drift of this thing, I think I have an opportunity to really flesh out a lot more, certainly more than Che—at least in this concept of him—and really more than Eva. Eva still remains a mystery, probably because she was psychotic…so driven. I don’t think she was neurotic but psychotic, and her view of reality was so distorted so as to be unreal, which is insanity. Perón was certainly not insane. For instance, in the first act finale, going from that intimate discussion scene between husband and wife to putting on the public Perón and then going back to the guy who is saying ‘Oh heck, why don’t we….well, maybe we could do something…’ to go back and forth from that enables the audience to see that this guy was exactly two-faced. The public and the private Perón.

I enjoy playing him so much because though you have to play the big moments, you can play them very big. If I can walk on stage as Perón, from the first crossover, people can say, ‘Ah, that’s Perón’ and they know he is dictator of Argentina—they have all the information by that time—he was a powerful general who won out over colonels and became top dog—then the intimate scenes (mostly the two bedroom scenes), I think they are very effective. I know that during Watergate, what I wanted to hear were those fucking tapes; to hear what this slimy guy said when there was no camera around and no microphone. Except there was a microphone. Those bedroom scenes are titillating on that level.

Here, behind the corridors of power, are these little nasty arguments and quibbling about great matters between two flesh and blood and terrifically fallible people. For a show this size, to telescope into these moments, which it does—rarely—but it does, is powerful.

The technical device that Hal uses that I find interesting, he calls ‘white-outs.’ It has yet to be recreated the way it’s supposed to be but it will on Broadway because it’s a much darker house. You will get the impact of the lights all coming up to a terrible brightness as opposed to the conventional black-out at the end of a scene. It’s like a flash picture and it burns the theatrical illusion out, if it works right, and the audience says, ‘this is only a show.’ It’s a very Brechtian thing.

They are renovating our New York theatre inside and out. $200,000 worth. Apparently they thing we’re going to be there a while. They wouldn’t drop that kind of money into the dressing rooms and façade otherwise. It’s tremendously exciting; that’s why we’re all itching to get back there. Actually, what I’m waiting for is the final direction from Hal. We’ve been directed in three segments—the initial period, the period mid-stroke in L.A., and the opening here. It’s my contention, we’ll see whether or not it’s true, that Hal is known for taking turkeys on the road and turning them into beautiful birds of prey on Broadway. What he has on his hands here is not a turkey by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t think it has the wattage of electricity that it could and will have.

A director’s last direction, the thing that really sets it off, is like a gunshot on stage. The impact is, once you bring the gun out, you’d better fire it. Once you fire it, that’s all you can fire it. You get one shot for an impact. Once the audience has seen that, then if the gun is flashed around and shot the second time, they say ‘we’ve had that before, we’ve already been assaulted.’ We haven’t gotten Hal’s gunshot yet and it’s on purpose. People have said to him ‘Come back here, Patti needs your help, everybody needs your help. We don’t know what we’re doing in a lot of things.’ Hal says, ‘There’s a method in my madness.’ I think it could very well be painful in some respects for some of us, there, because he gets everybody nervy-jumpy, but the shows he is involved with have great openings.

This show has to have sparks flying. Sparks between Che and Eva; sparks between Perón and Eva, sparks between the audience and what they’re watching. It obviously has a lot of impact now, but there are not enough gasps. There should be gasps.

One of my choices now (Hal hasn’t seen it yet so it may not be long for this world), it’s the strongest choice I’ve made since I set the character in motion. At the end when I sing ‘So what happens now, so what happens now,’ initially started with Perón closing the door [in the final bedroom scene]. He closed the door because the little girl [the mistress] used to be sitting on his bed. Now it’s closed for a different reason. And that is, this is a moment nobody must see or hear. She’s dying. But it originally came out of compassion on my part, or at least bewilderment. I was saying ‘Where do we go from here?’ Even the way I did it physically, people in the audience said they felt sorry for Perón, and felt that he was bereft and bereaved and I said ‘No! That’s not how he felt about this! Their marriage had died long before; he played with the dogs, he was screwing his young mistress during and after Eva’s death.’ I’ve seen pictures of him, and I recreate this too, leaning over her casket in this attitude of pious sorrow which he didn’t feel at all. So I said, ‘If this is the information they’ve been getting from my performance, then it’s wrong, it’s not true.’ Also, it’s not interesting because that’s a normal, conventional reaction. And these were not normal, conventional people.

So, beginning recently, I closed that door and she’s—if it’s Patti [LuPone], she’s sobbing and writing in pain; if it’s Terri [Klausner, the alternate], she’s a little more subdued, but they’re both obviously beginning their deaths, and I close the door. Instead of just ‘So what happens now?’ it’s a look right to her, saying ‘All right, bitch, we’ve been arguing for the last hour about these things you’re going to do. You’re dying. What are you going to do now?? Pull this one out of the fire!’

I don’t know if any such conversation ever took place, but I synthesize from the information I have about him that if he never said that to her, he must have felt it. I want to share with the audience what I think made these people interesting—but strange and unhealthy and weird and different from you and me, and it is so hard for me, Bob Gunton, to do that. It’s only as I give myself over to Perón, a process that sometimes works at night and sometimes doesn’t (but I now can create it technically if it’s not there). When it’s there, it is exhilarating. For me, it’s a hair-raising moment that, at someone’s death, a person could be so callous and cold and truthful enough not to spare her even that final slap and walk away saying, ‘Don’t ask anymore.’ In other words, ‘I’ve got my own problems to worry about now. As far as I’m concerned, you’re dead.’

After I’ve said that, and Che comes in the door and all that, I turn around. This is how the character grows. It used to be I almost couldn’t look at her because I knew she had her death to go through. Now, when I look at her, she’s dead…a non-person. ‘How can I manipulate her myth’ is what I’m saying on that walk downstage after she’s died. It’s ‘How do I turn this into a plus? Oh, I know what I’ll do,’ then a look at Che, and I am thinking ‘The masses have to be contended with. I’d best be out and get my plane ticket to Paraguay or get my stuff together.’

That bedroom scene used to have some terrible things in it. After I say ‘I’m trying to point out that you are dying,’ there was all that garbage: ‘This talk of death is chilling, an assault…etc.’ There is also a strong argument for putting back the lines about the children [the verse in the Lament on the concept album that was cut when staged]. Patti is vituperative about that.

There is another confusion. I was interviewed by a woman for a conservative Catholic monthly. She was a bright, but very conventional woman, and very nice. She was under the impression that during the ‘Rainbow Tour’ number, those two little girls on my knees were their [Eva and Juan’s] children who Perón was looking after while Eva was away in Europe. I guess I’m not being blatant enough, but it seems to me that these two nubile chickies sitting on a dirty old man’s lap (I sit there staring at one girl’s breasts for one whole verse), well….

There is a much better audience reaction now with merely the addition of a synopsis to the program [there wasn’t one during the Los Angeles run].

The number ‘She’s a Diamond’ is torpedoed right in the middle by Che’s speech. It works dramatically if the army finishes their verse and Perón says ‘But on the other hand.’ It’s a direct argument between Perón and the officers and then here comes the bearded one [Che] spouting this sort of interesting information that says Buenos Aires went down the tubes during Perón’s rule, but the audience has forgotten what Perón is saying ‘but on the other hand’ to. So I have to connect it back to Che and back to the army. The audience thinks I’m arguing with Che but I’m not arguing with him in the least. It’s awkward, and I feel I have to fight from a hole to get back to what the thing is about, but since Hall was the one who put in that bit of information, I dare say it will stay. It’s just one of the things you have to work around.

I originally wanted to play Che. I didn’t think I had a chance, but I did want to audition for the role, and I even began growing the beard, and I went up to Prince’s office. He had seen the Broadway show I’d done called King of Hearts, where I played an older man opposite Millicent Martin. His casting director called me up and said ‘Hal would like to see you for Evita. I presumed it would be for Che, so I went up there with my beard and looking a little funky, and she handed me the sides [the music] and it said [‘Perón.’ Actually, when I first heard the album I thought I might have had a crack at Magaldi. I was singing in that style and I always wear a moustache anyway, and I look sort of Latin. I never dreamed they would not cast Perón as an old character.

But, if I were playing Che, well, it seems to me to be a tremendous opportunity for an actor (Mandy’s known as an actor. People will be knocked out when they find out he’s a tremendous singer). It seems to me an opportunity for a clash of titans. I don’t know as much about Guevara as I know about Perón, but I do know enough about him to see in him this man of the peasants who led a guerrilla war in at least three jungles…who was also a doctor. He’s got to have been an eloquent, charismatic man to have led the people and to have had the success he did, and to live as he does to this day in the memories of South American Marxists. He lived in the jungles, and he’s real funky and he died in the jungles and he was real funky. It seems to me that he was a fully rounded-out, cool, fire-and-ice man. He had that little smile that is the final resting place of anger. He is so well-educated…he’d have at his command irony, coolness, and that tensile strength. I think continually throughout the show he has to be that way. He is a device, but I don’t think an actor can worry about being a device. An actor has to be that person, unless you’re going to call the character ‘El Gallo’ [the narrator in The Fantasticks] or ‘The Narrator’—if you call him that, then it must be done that way. If he were to walk into the funeral as if it were a barroom or a toilet that he was invading, you’d get a sense that he was completely isolated from what is happening there—even though he’s going to take part in it, usher people around and narrate it. There is something in him that says, ‘I’m Argentine, look at what these people did. It must not happen again. This woman had great power.’

There’s another thing to be played here, and Mandy’s [Patinkin] playing it a little bit, and that is if Che ever met Eva, he would have been fascinated by her because he was as driven in his philosophical things as she was in her own personal ambitions. He sacrificed his upper middle class life, while she sacrificed her personal life to be Queen of the May. I don’t know, physically, how I’d do the role. It would probably be cooler and funkier. Tom [Carder, Patinkin’s understudy] does it a little that way. He sings it like a rock score, and improvises a lot. He doesn’t have quite the raspy quality [David] Essex has, but it is more of a rock sound. Hal won’t like it because he does not want this to be a rock musical. But, in fact, it is a rock musical. Tom has a weasel ferret-like quality, and it works too for Che. Che is an obnoxious, definable personality, and that personality is coming into conflict with what he’s seeing and what he is engineering. He has a reaction to everything up there…a gut reaction."

Bob also wondered why they never had Eva call Perón ‘Juancito’ [little Juan] but decided that there were no casual moments in the show like "‘Eva, I’m home.’ ‘Did you have a nice day, honey?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, had another junta.’"

"Geez, I would have loved to have met her. I tell people that if I go to hell, I’m going to go knocking on doors and find this lady."

These interviews were done by the author in person on the date(s) stated.

© 2000