This musical is a five-star sensation — it hit my senses first, then my brain

Times

2 days ago

Just this once, believe the hype. Evita's much publicised balcony scene, in which Rachel Zegler's Eva Perón serenades the good people of Oxford Circus with Don't Cry for Me Argentina while the audience inside watch on a giant screen, is a joy. But Jamie Lloyd's revival of the 1978 musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice feels like a conveyor belt of highlights, one after the other. Amping up the revival he first staged at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park in 2019, Lloyd moves it indoors — and then blows the roof off. This Evita is simply sensational.
That alfresco balcony scene is both an outlier and a hallmark of the boundary-pushing fun to be found throughout. Cameras follow Zegler as she swaps this Eva's uniform of bra top and hot pants for her more familiar white suit. It could so easily be naff, yet the clash of artifice and reality — why, there's a glimpse of the crowd standing outside the Pret next door! — makes for a great moment. It's as exciting as Tom Francis's walk round the block in Lloyd's Sunset Boulevard (with Nicole Scherzinger) but drilled deeper into the storytelling.
Why? Because it's our sole glimpse of Eva, the wife of the authoritarian president Juan Perón, facing her public. She glances at the cameras to make us her confidants as she puts on her show. And then the cameras follow her as she strides back on stage to sing High Flying, Adored from the top of the wide bank of steps that is Soutra Gilmour's set. Kapow!
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The kapows keep coming. The remarkable sound of the requiem at the start, from a huge cast shrouded in cowls, smoke and spotlights. Diego Andres Rodriguez as our narrator, Che, striding around casually for Oh What a Circus, and ending up half-naked and bloodied. The sinuous, half-dressed chorus who bump, grind, crawl and tango their way across the steps, creating the world of mid-century Buenos Aires, telling stories with their bodies alone (a medal, please, for the choreographer Fabian Aloise). Haze and spotlights add to the sense of place, of forward motion and sexual desire. Is this the most sensual Lloyd Webber production of them all? It feels radical, yet also rooted in faithful, full-hearted renditions of some of his catchiest tunes.
At the centre of it all is the American Zegler, 24, oozing starry command. Making herself strategically doll-like as she plays with the patriarchy, her Eva is always magnetic. Zegler aces the charisma and, not least, vocal power required of an approach that's sometimes more like a Beyoncé stadium show than a West End musical. All that notoriety for her brash comments about Snow White suddenly feels old. A star is reborn.
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Is there collateral damage from Lloyd's ever-stylish, rarely literal approach? Yes, there is some loss of clarity, even if you always get the gist, and some of Rice's adroit lyrics get lost in the gig-level amplification. The songs and the story are less compelling in the more contemplative conclusion.
The worst this ever is, though, is a truly great concert performance. It is properly sensational, in that it hits the senses first, the brain second. Did I feel huge amounts for our morally ambiguous heroine? Not really. Did I care that I didn't care? Not really. What a circus. What a parade. ★★★★★London Palladium
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