Rachel Zegler Delights in an ‘Evita' for the Masses

New York Times

8 hours ago

'She's a diamond in their dull gray lives,' sings the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón of his wife in 'Evita,' Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's sung-through musical about Eva Perón. She was a former matinee star whose popularity among the working classes bolstered support for her husband's government, and 'Evita' expresses some skepticism about political populism. Yet a new revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd and running at the London Palladium through Sept. 6, is emphatically populist in its relentless bombast, heavy symbolism and button-pushing grandiosity.
The initially moody staging — industrial gray metal stairs, smoke effects, dark costumes — belies the sensory overload ahead: Balloons are popped; lights are turned up blindingly bright; blue and white confetti rain down on the audience. Rachel Zegler ('Snow White' and 'West Side Story'), making her West End debut, is a delight in the title role, strutting bossily in a black leather bra and hot pants while a chorus — representing soldiers or ordinary citizens — cavorts elaborately around her to a brassy tango-inspired soundtrack, delivered by an 18-piece band. (Choreography is by Fabian Aloise, lighting is by Jon Clark and set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.)
The show begins and ends with Evita's death from cancer, at the age of 33, in 1952. In the intervening two hours she is goaded and reproached in song by Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), a wisecracking Everyman in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts, who teases Evita for cozying up to an authoritarian leader and sleeping her way to the top. In one song he quips bitterly, 'Don't you just love the smack of firm government?' (For this impertinence, he is later killed — doused with fake blood, then with blue and white paint, the colors of the Argentine flag.)
Evita is portrayed as a cynical, ruthless social climber, and the audience is invited to sympathize with the people she hurts along the way. She unceremoniously dumps a boyfriend — the tango singer Agustín Magaldi (played with hangdog charm by Aaron Lee Lambert, who sings beautifully) — once he has ceased to be useful to her. And she breezily steals Perón (James Olivas, physically imposing but stiff — and thus convincingly military) from his girlfriend (Bella Brown), who sings a doleful song before vanishing, never to be seen again.
Much preshow hype surrounded Lloyd's decision to stage the famous scene in which Evita sings the show's signature tune, 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina,' on the theater's exterior balcony; members of the public see the spectacle in the flesh, while theatergoers make do with video footage beamed onto a big screen in real time.
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