Eva Peron, Superstar

By Frank Rich

EVITA Lyrics by Tim Rice; Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Some of the best drama in London this season can be found outside the West End's Prince Edward Theater. Just before curtain time each night, a mini-mob scene unfolds. Bejeweled women--British, American and Arab--pile out of Silver Shadow limos with Savile Row-suited escorts in tow. Sleazy-looking scalpers with cockney accents auction off their wares to desperate millionaires. Sad-faced teen-agers stare dolefully at the crowd, hoping that they might somehow crash the Prince Edward's lobby. No such luck. Only ticket holders are allowed past the theater's tuxedoed doormen, and the show is sold out until late fall.

The cause of all this commotion is Evita, a pop opera that opened to rave reviews in late June. A hotter West End commodity than either A Chorus Line or Annie, this song-and-dance account of Argentine First Lady Eva Peron (1919-52) may be the biggest London smash since Jesus Christ Superstar opened there six years ago. Like Superstar, which will soon pass Oliver! to become England's alltime longest-running musical, Evita is the creation of Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and Lyricist Tim Rice. Both shows also share a producer, Robert Stigwood, who is best known to American audiences as a force behind the movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

These are very lucky men, for Evita's London success far outstrips the show's merits. Though extravagantly staged by American Director Harold Prince, whom Stigwood imported for the occasion, Evita is a cold and uninvolving show that does little to expand the traditional musical comedy format or our understanding of a bizarre historical figure. Evita is often spectacular in its pretensions, but it is not even the best musical to touch on the subject of political repression. That honor belongs to two of Prince's Broadway productions--Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret.

Many of Evita's failings are a function of Rice's libretto, which never aspires to much more than a comic-book version of history. The author dutifully chronicles Evita's impoverished youth, her Buenos Aires radio career and her rise to power once married to Colonel Juan Peron (Joss Ackland). But Rice's point of view on his heroine is pure show biz; he's so agog he might as well be describing the career of Judy Garland. By the time Evita dies of cancer at age 33, we know she's a "legend," but we have no idea of how to judge her: to Rice, fascism seems to be more a cultural style than a political ideology. Elaine Paige, 30, the heretofore unknown actress who plays Evita, does little to help. Her clarion, belting voice has made her a star overnight in London, but she is a strident actress who fails to convey Evita's erotic magnetism.

Almost as offensive as the show's characterization of Evita is its use of Che Guevara (David Essex) as narrator. Though Argentine-born, Guevara had no prominent involvement in the history of his country during the Peron era and did not know Evita. Why Rice has included him is a mystery, since the writer seems to know little about him. In Evita, Che is a bland, almost apolitical character who, his guerrilla garb aside, might just as aptly be called the Stage Manager or, for that matter, Nick Carraway.

If Rice were a dazzling writer, such silliness might be tolerable, but his lyrics rarely rise above the cute. ("The people ... need to adore me/ So Christian Dior me," sings Evita to her couturiers.) The show's structure is clumsy. In addition to the narration and flashbacks within flashbacks, Rice introduces an irrelevant character just to plug his best song (Another Suitcase in Another Hall). That sort of contrivance hasn't been seen in a musical since Carol Haney sang Hernando's Hideaway in The Pajama Game.

Despite its synthetic Latinisms, flip dissonance and references to Lennon-McCartney songs, Webber's music is evocative and often catchy. Prince's staging is more problematical. Using a large company and rear-projected newsreel footage, the director has created some undeniably powerful tableaux: Evita's political rallies, her death and funeral have a dark and chilling majesty. But Prince is capable of sinking to Rice's simplistic level: Argentina's aristocratic class is symbolized by a phalanx of chorus people who seem to have stepped out of the Ascot Gavotte number of My Fair Lady. The director also cannibalizes his own previous work. Evita's portentous first-act finale (A New Argentina) is a dead ringer for that of Cabaret (Tomorrow Belongs to Me). The show's neo-Brechtian lighting scheme and montage finale also recall that 1966 production.

Stigwood plans to bring Evita to Broadway next year, where its London reception is not likely to be repeated. New Yorkers, who only this season have seen Prince's On the Twentieth Century, may not go quite so gaga over the lavish stagecraft of Evita. The Webber-Rice score, an immediate hit in England when released as a double album in 1976, has failed to catch on in the States. Still, all is not necessarily lost. If Stigwood can only find a way to package the show that is playing outside the Prince Edward Theater instead of the one onstage, he might yet have a hit here. --Frank Rich

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