Elena Roger in Evita
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What's new,
Evita (not to mention Buenos Aires)? Quite a lot, it turns out, in Michael Grandage's revival, at times electrifying and at others overearnest, of the last (and, many argue, best) of the four collaborations between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Opening 28 years to the day after Hal Prince's original London staging beat a global path for the British musical that has scarcely let up since, Grandage has discarded Prince's famously spare, neo-Brechtian approach in favour of something grander and far more self-consciously monumental: a song-and-dance icon fully aware of its formidable status. From our first glimpse of Christopher Oram's imposing set, lit to an elegantly heightened fare-thee-well by Paule Constable, the design hints at what the production goes on to bear out: this
Evita pays full obeisance to the operatic aspirations of Lloyd Webber and Rice's rock opera, and if the result bypasses much of the wit—and bitter humour—that first time round sold the sizzle, at least on Broadway, Grandage and co. ensure that on their own terms attention must be paid.
Indeed, it's hard not to sit up and take note from the start, though those with long memories will miss the open-air screening sequence that jolted the Prince staging into being. Here, a frontcloth showing a portrait of Eva Peron rises, giving way to newsreel footage from July 1952, reporting our dubious heroine's death from cancer, age 33. We then see a solitary woman in a state of extreme grief, soon joined by a stage full of mourners who pair off into couples for a dance saturated in anguish; the connection won't be lost—for those who were then in Britain—on the reaction at the time to the sudden death at age 36 of Princess Diana, another massively popular figure, albeit of a very different sort. Suddenly, from amongst a cluster of the bereaved that could have stepped out of The House of Bernarda Alba emerges a diminutive figure shedding her head gear only to be revealed as 15-year-old Eva Duarte. And a star, as they say, is born.
Make no doubt about it: Argentine performer Elena Roger is a star, and her Eva Peron brought the crowd to its feet with an enthusiasm extending well beyond opening night protocol. Thickly accented, as was to be expected, Roger is as different from Patti LuPone as LuPone, in turn, is from Elaine Paige. Considerably more slight of build than her English and American forbears, the petite, flashing-eyed Roger owns the stage from the moment Oram's design takes us from Eva's hometown of Junin into the courtyard of the Casa Rosada, the Argentinian presidential palace that defines this production visually just as the black scaffolding, with floor to match, marked out Prince's take on the material. Leading that dynamite ensemble samba, "Buenos Aires," whose wholesale exuberance Rob Ashford's choreography doesn't quite achieve again, Roger projects precisely the magnetism that would lead the descamisados toward elevating one of their own—and an audience toward confirming in Roger the very "star quality" of which Eva sings.
Elena Roger and Philip Quast
in Evita
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It's not just that Roger is, one presumes for the first time, a stage Evita of the same nationality as the character; authenticity, after all, only goes so far when you're playing someone who has been clearly reconceived for the theatre by two Englishmen, for all that Lloyd Webber and David Cullen's new orchestrations amplify the Latinisms of the score. (The tango is the aesthetic lynchpin.) And at times, truth to tell, Roger's foreignness, at least within this musical's Anglo-American creative context, lets proceedings down. One particularly misses the full-lipped, ripe sense of abandon—anything goes indeed!—that LuPone brought to numbers like "Rainbow High," here none too interestingly re-envisioned as part of a larger musical set piece about luggage, just as "The Art of the Possible" earlier reduces General Peron's military machinations to a rather awkwardly brutish dance of death. Prince and choreographer Larry Fuller's vision of that same number as a game of musical chairs proves, indeed, an impossible act to follow.
But if Roger doesn't seize upon the humour—a forgivable enough lapse for someone singing a demanding score not in her native tongue—she compensates with the sort of presence not taught by Berlitz. Roger commands attention as she is tossed libidinously from one lover to the next during "Goodnight and Thank You," and she seems to intertwine herself around Philip Quast's outsized Peron both physically and emotionally during "I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You." The arc of the Perons' relationship is one of the genuine thrills charted by Grandage, whose immersion over the years in classical theatre brings a texture to a hastily drawn partnership that stays with you long after the curtain has come down. Roger may barely come up to Quast's navel but she posits a tiny spitfire with nerves of steel, whose devotion—she ends "A New Argentina" looking not at the audience but at the husband who will bring her to power—makes you wonder what these same two performers might be like playing the Macbeths. (Eva even gets a sequence late on where her past flits before her, as in Shakespeare's play.)
Roger's forte as an actress on this evidence lies in tragedy, and she chronicles Eva's descent into illness with real gravity, not teary grandstanding. And once his wife's body gives way, Quast, in another terrific performance from this three-time Olivier Award-winner, himself seems to snap in two, a giant man undone by undying love for a woman who (a neat touch here) haunts the balcony of the Casa Rosada even upon her death, at which point this production sends spinning a bed from which Eva neatly disappears. If the net effect is to reduce Matt Rawle's casual, over-gesticulating Che—the third point in the show's thespian triangle—to the role of irksome observer rather than moral conscience, that's part of the determination with which Grandage has rethought the show from the ground up. Those fresh to Evita, of course, won't care about comparisons, and for those who do? I can't imagine anyone who won't want to see the first post-Falklands Evita and marvel at the way in which "A New Argentina" isn't all that's new.
Evita
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Book and Lyrics by Tim Rice
Directed by Michael Grandage
Adelphi Theatre