EVITA MAKES AMERICAN DEBUT AT THE PAVILION
Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1979.
By Sylvie Drake

Once in a while, a show will come along to give the lie to tradition and remind us that, in the theater, anything is possible. The things to watch for are the exceptions, not the rules.

Traditionally, facts tend to shackle biographical pieces. So Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince come along with Evita, a musical about Argentina's Perons that sticks surprisingly close to biography, yet invests it with enough mythology, license and plain editorializing that the mixture of fact and fancy simply works as theatre.

Evita was launched Tuesday at the Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in an American premiere that comes to us on the heels of the show's huge success in London, where it opened almost a year ago and is reportedly sold out through December. The American Evita is again staged by Prince, but with an entirely new company of actors, including a shaky Patti LuPone in the title role.

As with Rice and Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita is mislabeled a musical. It is an opera. To avoid the dreaded word (Broadway's intimidated by it), its creators are calling it a musical phenomenon. Phenomenon it is, now flawless but possessed of at least three vital ingredients: tremendous scope, a remarkable score and the directorial genius of Prince. There is a dark flash and vulgarity to its tone, protagonists who reflect essence rather than externals, and the presence of Che Guevara (Mandy Patinkin) as a sardonic goad, a challenger and Greek chorus. It is Evita's only bit of absolute fiction, but that is all it takes to free the work from the straightjacket of reality.

Not consistently, however. The early biographical scenes in Junin, where Eva grew up, are crowded with needless exposition, embarrassingly naïve, and they just lie there ('On This Night of a Thousand Stars,' 'Eva Beware of the City') in sharp contrast to the vaulting sophistication of the second act, further enhanced by the particular brilliance of Prince's staging in those final scenes.

Only when theatricality successfully overtakes linear biography does Evita soar. Its opening ('Requiem for Evita,' 'Oh What a Circus'), with Eva Peron's open coffin on stage, a prowling, snarling Che pacing around it and David Hersey's spectral lighting casting ghoulish shadows as it beams up from the floor, immediately pulls us into this fantasy based on fact--Brechtian, uncomfortable and subtly tainted by the garishness of hypocrisy.

'Buenos Aires,' when our heroine arrives in the big city determined to conquer it, is admirable for its musical excess and raucousness, and superbly matched by the deliberate vulgarisms of Larry Fuller's choreography. The fact that Patti LuPone had trouble keeping up both with the dancing and the singing of this number hurt it peripherally.

LuPone's Evita ranges disconcertingly from poor to superior. Her early scenes are manic, this damage compounded by some evident difficulty in keeping up with music and dance. But she improves remarkably as the evening progresses. Where the demand is heavy on interpretation, she's on home ground; and as Eva matures, so does LuPone. Aside from the dismaying habit of not looking at the person she is addressing in song (is this direction or personal choice?), she gives excellent renderings of 'High Flying Adored,' 'Rainbow High' and 'Rainbow Tour.' Her scene on the balcony of the Casa Rosada and the final ones, racked by illness, her life remembered in snatches, are intensely moving. Curiously, her resemblance to the real Eva, nonexistent at first, intensifies as she more fully captures the woman, growing into an uncanny likeness at the end and attesting to the elusive reality of an actor's psychological transformation.

Both Patinkin as the mincing, fuming, restless Che, and Bob Gunton as an impeccably cloned Peron, turn in careful performances. Patinkin, for whom this is a first singing role, unveils a powerful high tenor voice that is almost an antithesis to his growling presence. Gunton on the other hand, is notable for the magnetism of his restraint. He can be perfectly still (often is) and draw your eyes to him. His deep, mellow tones merely supplement this power to attract.

Ultimately, however, this remains a piece that rides on the strength of its rich and complex score (Rice's lyrics are less even, going from fairly elementary to delightfully inventive) and the physical orchestrations of Prince's mastermind. Nothing in his staging exists by chance. From the positioning of the lowliest member of the chorus, to the integration of color and texture, the visionary planning is everywhere evident. It is not by accident that the chorus of aristocrats moves sideways like a crab--a fixed black body of disarticulated components. It projects a corroded formality. Nor is it by chance that the red, white and blue chorus of army officers moves like tin soldiers in unison-or that the army colonels vie for power in a deadly serious game of musical chairs ('The Art of the Possible').

The richly bannered, overpowering settings with crisp projections in black and white (by England's Tazeena Firth and Timothy O'Brien), Fuller's superbly apt and visually engaging choreography, Abe Jacob's lucid sound, Hersey's consistently atmospheric lighting, are never without specific purpose--as comment or as complement. Jane Ohringer's single number as Peron's Lolita-like mistress ('Another Suitcase in Another Hall'), is a dream cameo. All that is required is the plea of a warm and languid voice-and Ohringer possesses it. Mark Syers is properly nondescript as the nondescript Magaldi.

In the end, it is every component of this show that serves it, not the least being the quasi-anonymous hand-picked members of the omnipresent chorus. That the show is underrehearsed was obvious Tuesday. That it will get stronger is certain. Its opening on Broadway in September is already set. Ironically, it could be Sweeney Todd's liveliest competition-or Hal Prince competing with Hal Prince.

For the time being, however, it's at the Dorothy Chandler through July 7.



Design © 2000