THE AMERICANIZATION OF EVITA
Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1979
By Barbara Isenberg

New York-Up on the 45th floor, in a rehearsal room with an incredible view of Manhattan, director Harold Prince and actress Patti LuPone were talking out one more scene of the hit English musical Evita. As they moved about the room, Prince playing the role of LuPone's maid, two photographers from Life magazine circled them, clicking fast.

Prince was squeezed for rehearsal time before Tuesday's opening at Los Angeles's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, but the press was everywhere. British reporters camped out last year at London auditions-one critic reportedly likened the show's publicity to the Normandy invasion-and the commotion surrounding the American debut in Los Angeles was mounting. Cast as Evita, LuPone has already been photographed by Richard Avedon for Vogue; a profile of the actress is expected in People magazine.

The press, of course, had plenty to work with. Prince, who earlier took us to Germany for Cabaret and Japan for Pacific Overtures, now re-creates the Argentina of legendary first lady Eva ('Evita') Duarte Peron. Evita was written as a rock opera by lyricist Tim Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (the British team that brought the world Jesus Christ Superstar) and produced by Robert Stigwood, whose empire has embraced not only Superstar but, more recently, the films Grease and Saturday Night Fever.

Its producers claim that there hasn't been an empty seat since Evita opened in London last June, but there's no sure thing on Broadway. So following rehearsals here in New York,--'This is home,' said Prince-the show travels to Los Angeles and San Francisco before September's Broadway opening. 'I think we have a good chance of hitting here,' said Rice, 'but we're not complacent.'

There are more than 40 people in the Evita cast and most were in constant motion between the show's two midtown rehearsal halls. Downstairs, in a mirrored room, singers belted out choruses from folding chairs as, behind them, nestled amid the duffel and tote bags, dancers stretched and squatted, limbering muscles and waiting their turns.

Upstairs, choreographer Larry Fuller was putting together 'Peron's Latest Flame,' an intricate number that required some finely timed movements on the part of a clutch of aristocrats on the one hand and army officers on the other. It took hours to coordinate the various parts and when the dancers finally glided across the carefully marked 'stage,' with its multi colored lines and circles not unlike a basketball court, there were no bleachers, no stand filled with crowds. There was only Prince and his staff-the most critical audience of all.

Sometimes pacing at the back of the rehearsal hall, Prince shifted continually from script to stage, observer to participant. One moment relaxed in a chair, the next up on his feet with pictures from a souvenir brochure of the London show, he helped the U.S. cast learn what had been learned, re-create what had been created.

Evita's London cast is still playing there to sold-out houses (although star Elaine Paige starts a month's vacation Monday) and Prince has recast the show here. His Evita, Patti LuPone, was a founding member of John Houseman's Acting Company. Mandy Patinkin, who plays Che Guevara, played Mark on Broadway in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shadow Box. Guevara is his first singing role and is used in Evita as a Greek chorus to question and comment on Eva Peron's promises and postures.

Patinkin prowled the rehearsals like a cat, cracking jokes, mumbling asides, and Prince restructured a formerly flagging number called 'Rainbow Tour' partly to capitalize on Patinkin's humor and energy. As Evita and her entourage move from country to country during her famed Rainbow Tour of Europe, Patinkin as narrator switches accents as Evita switches nations.

Many of the people involved with the show have done considerable research on the Juan Peron regime, and native Californian Bob Gunton, who plays Peron, talked of the dictator as if he knew the man. For him, Peron was 'an oversmiling guy with no warmth behind the smile, a little bit on the slimy side yet magnetic, macho but with a streak of femininity.'

LuPone can toss off the dates of magazine articles on Eva Peron, can duplicate from photographs the sometimes clawlike way she held her hands, but confessed she still has no clear sense of the woman. 'She was so much,' said LuPone. 'Everything I read was impressions, everything she wrote was propaganda. I have an idea, but can't verbalize it, of what she was.'

Prince, however, seemed to have his heroine nailed. Explaining, for example, that Evita would not appreciate the grand jewelry she always wore, he showed LuPone how to carelessly remove and toss away elegant earrings. The director similarly drilled chorus members playing poor Argentinians, showing them not just where to put their feet and which way to look, but even how they should 'think poverty.'

'Most of us have done featured parts, but there's a certain aura about a Hal Prince show that makes being in the chorus worth it,' said David Staller, a member of the Evita chorus. 'I'd be a tree-and practically am-to be involved in this show,' John Leslie Wolfe, one of the three people who gave up parts in the current Broadway musical Sarava for Evita, added that he didn't want to 'toot my own horn, but we're the cream of the crop.' [Ed. Note: Wolfe went on to star as Peron in Flo Lacey's World Tour.]

It all started back in late 1973 when lyricist Rice heard a radio program about Eva Peron, listened to it again and took off for Argentina. (Before that, he has written, he knew only such things as that she'd appeared on Argentine stamps, was good-looking and was dead.) Both he and Lloyd Webber had long worried about just how to follow a multimedia smash like Superstar, and with the rich history of Evita, felt they'd found a story that 'could be the one strong enough to follow Superstar.'

Eva Peron wasn't a particularly obvious choice, even for artists who had similarly chosen Jesus Christ, and one critic quipped about possible follow-ups like Jackie, Indira and Margaret. Yet it was full of possibilities: the tale of a glamorous small-town actress turned political consort, who changed the history of Argentina and was elevated to quasi-sainthood before dying of cancer in 1952, when she was only 33.

Not that there wasn't a problem of possibly glorifying a figure the authors considered more intriguing than admirable. Rice said he considers the opera 80% anti-Evita, and he and Lloyd Webber also wrote a separate, hardbound biography called Evita (Elm Tree Books, London), designed, among other things, to present 'the case against Eva Peron.'

Rice's libretto also uses revolutionary Che Guevara as a character who, not unlike Judas in Superstar, could narrate, judge and challenge the goings-on. While the authors claim no knowledge that Che and Eva ever met, Argentina-born Guevara was only 17 when the Perons came to power and, said Rice, was 'certainly' influenced by them.

In their book, Lloyd Webber refers to Che as Evita's 'musical alter ego,' and Che's alternating fascination and disgust with her seems to reflect their own mixed feelings. For Lloyd Webber, she was unsympathetic and unpleasant yet compelling. For Rice, she was vicious and selfish, yet 'she had style, in spades.'

'Whether you like her or not, approve or disapprove, she assumes the size of a mythological character,' Prince added during a rehearsal break. 'The tragedy is larger than life. The obsessions and insatiability of a character like that are great, big emotions for the stage.'

Those emotions weren't bad on vinyl either for, like its predecessor Superstar, Evita first achieved success as a double-record album. Superstar, which also had no spoken dialogue, was produced first as a record because everybody had turned it down for the theater, said Lloyd Webber. Evita debuted the same way, he added, 'but with Evita, we knew it would get produced.'

Lloyd Webber said that he still has a cable Prince sent asking to do Superstar--it arrived a little late--and so, when he and Rice finished the rough tapes for the Evita album back in 1976, they brought them to Prince. Prince liked what he heard but said he wouldn't be available for more than a year. 'We waited because he was worth waiting for,' said Lloyd Webber. 'He was absolutely right for the piece.'

They were hardly just waiting. The original album, recorded in the same studios that launched Superstar in 1970, was released in November 1976, and took off immediately. According to the show's co-producer David Land, 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' became England's number one song and Evita its top album by February 1977--16 months before the show's opening in London.

'Argentina' was a hit in several countries-Land said 100 versions of the song appeared in Germany-and Lou Cook, MCA Records vice president, international, said over 1 million copies of the single 'Argentina' were sold in England alone. The album, said Cook, has already reached the million mark on the international market. All of that makes for a situation where the audience walks in, as well as out, humming tunes from the show. And, said Prince, the timing couldn't have been better: 'The record had died down in popularity when the show was born. It gave it a whole new life.'

The album didn't sell much in the United States, however--MCA executive Cook blames lack of radio play here-and the show goes up on U.S. stages without the built-in following that preceded it in London. One reason for the pre-Broadway opening in Los Angeles is to get some frenzy going, and MCA, which already has put out an English cast album, hopes to have an American cast album in the stores by the time the show gets to New York.

The American press has been somewhat harsher on Evita than has the British press. Time magazine's Frank Rich, for example, enjoyed the scalpers and ticket-seekers outside the London theatre more than the show inside. But most critics on both sides of the Atlantic raved about the staging. New York Post critic Clive Barnes, while questioning whether Evita would be as well received here as in England, commented that Prince 'has never given us a more spectacular staging.'

Film and slides complement the live action, and Prince said the chance to experiment with mixed media-'something that generally makes me yawn' was one of Evita's enticements. So was the challenge of characterizing crowds, something Prince handled in part through set design. The director drew heavily on Siqueiros murals he saw in Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle, only later learning from a BBC documentary that Che Guevara had actually taken photographs of tourists in front of that very castle. 'That tied everything up for me,' smiled Prince, 'some higher being is protecting us.'

Prince altered the Evita text somewhat, throwing out some numbers, adding a new one. But the notion of a musical starting in London rather than being imported from the United States drew such press attention--it was a new story, said Prince, as well as a theatrical event-that he shied away from early changes once the show started previews.

Changes have come in spurts. When David Essex left the part of Che some five months after the show's opening, Prince did some cutting and changed the ending to give it 'a more forceful, abrasive conclusion.' He made further changes, such as restructuring the Rainbow Tour number and dropping 'obvious Anglicisms,' when he started rehearsing the U.S. cast.

Other aspects of the London production have been retained. The successful London sets and costumes were duplicated here, including facsimiles of the much-photographed Eva Peron's wardrobe. Besides recreating a pale beige mink and red fox coat, the show's designers also duplicated necklaces and other jewelry, even a specific Dior suit Eva Peron wore on her tour of Europe. [Ed. Note: the suit used in the 'Rainbow High' and Tour numbers was actually from a later period.]

Eva Peron was known as a fashion figure, explained Donna Thomas, the assistant costume designer. She added that clothes are used in the show to say something about the former actress's changing status. In 'Goodnight and Thank You,' for example, a song depicting her use and dismissal of assorted lovers, Evita starts the number in a pink chenille bathrobe and ends it in a white satin and velvet negligee with feather trim.

Freddie Gershon, president of the Stigwood Group Ltd. Said it should cost about $400,000 extra to bring the cast, sets and all to California before the Broadway opening. But Gershon and the Civic Light Opera, which he said is absorbing 'a good part' of those costs, think it's well worth the trouble. CLO co-managing director Ernest H. Martin noted this is the first time CLO is presenting the U.S. debut of an English musical since Oliver in 1952, adding he considered it 'kind of a coup for Los Angeles to have [Evita's] American premiere.'

Gershon said the CLO's subscription audiences in Los Angeles and San Francisco guarantee 16 weeks of 'substantially well-filled houses.' (Martin, in turn, said there has been 'great demand' for tickets already.) Talking of how Broadway is blasé about new shows and Los Angeles is so sophisticated internationally, Gershon said the continent-hopping Los Angeles-based entertainment industry already 'had such a buzz going' about the London production that Evita nearly was a presold commodity.

Four months in California shouldn't hurt record sales either. MCA's Cook estimated worldwide sales for the original two-part album of Jesus Christ Superstar at more than 6 million worldwide, and is planning 'a major, major promotional campaign' for the contemplated U.S. cast album of Evita. Such performers as Olivia Newton-John, the Carpenters and Stan Getz already have recorded 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina,' said David Land, adding that the song has been declared gold or silver in so many countries 'that we've run out of walls.'

Gershon said the Stigwood Group is now considering various film offers, noting they've no intention of waiting until Evita's stage production is years old before bringing out a movie version. [Ed. Note: famous last words…] In fact, he hinted, it's possible they'll have a multi-million-dollar film deal signed even before Tuesday's opening. Gershon confirmed that representatives of both Bete Midler and Barbra Streisand have approached them, mentioning Ann-Margret as another contender for the film's title role.

Once the film deal materializes, RSO Records, another part of the Stigwood Group, would cash in on not just the film score but a probable Evita disco album, said Gershon. Composer Lloyd Webber has just recorded Patti LuPone doing 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' as well as produced a disco version of 'Buenos Aires' for RSO.

Rice and Lloyd Webber, meanwhile, have been visiting the United States to help give the show, and no doubt the album, what Rice calls 'a hard sell.' Superstar was first produced on Broadway rather than in London, and, said Rice, 'We'd like to have a hit musical in the land that musicals come from, and it would be nice to prove that in England we can start them too.'


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