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New York Times
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Rachel Zegler Delights in an ‘Evita' for the Masses
'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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Boston Globe
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
One bad leader can wreck a nation
Advertisement Juan Domingo Perón became president of Argentina in 1946. He created mass movements and, with their support, proceeded to undermine every institution that limited his power. He was overthrown and exiled after a decade but continued to dominate Argentine politics from abroad. In 1973 he returned and reclaimed the presidency. He left behind a deeply divided country that would soon explode into civil war. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Rebellion and repression have ended, but Argentina remains caught in the pro-Perónist vs. anti-Perónist paradigm. The country continues to swing wildly. Political warfare is intense. The economy limps along, crippled by lack of investment and periods of extreme inflation. Perón set a robust and dynamic country into a long decline from which it has not recovered. Half a world away from Argentina lies another country that was once thought to have limitless potential. In 1980 the former British colony of Rhodesia became independent, renamed Zimbabwe. It had a stable currency, modern infrastructure, highly productive farms, and a strong manufacturing sector. A former political prisoner named Robert Mugabe was elected president. 'You have inherited a jewel,' the founding father of nearby Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, told him as he assumed power. 'Keep it that way.' Advertisement Mugabe did the opposite. He ordered all foreigners and whites who owned businesses to sell 51 percent of their holdings to Black Zimbabweans. Then he confiscated hundreds of farms and turned them over to veterans of the liberation war, few of whom had any farming experience. Food shortages soon gripped the country. Famine followed. Investors fled. Jobs disappeared. The educated elite emigrated and the remaining middle class dissolved. Mugabe printed so much money that by 2008, prices were doubling every 24 hours and the annual inflation rate reached 7.9 billion percent. The erstwhile 'breadbasket of Africa' was reduced to surviving on food aid. Mugabe was finally deposed in 2017, when he was 93. In 30 years of misrule, A thousand miles north of Zimbabwe lies another example of what one terrible ruler can do to a country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After helping to depose the Congo's first post-independence leader, Advertisement Who ruined Iran? By some measures it was Ayatollah Khomeini, who upon seizing power in 1979 imposed strict religious rule on one of the world's most cosmopolitan societies. Looking further back, one could posit that Mohammad Reza Shah, who ruled for 25 years until Khomeini pushed him from power, was truly responsible, because his dictatorship set the stage for the mullahs' regime. In any case, the combination of those two tyrants has reduced Iran, potentially one of the world's leading countries, to an impoverished and unhappy backwater. Some countries revive after periods of rule by catastrophic leaders. Germany, with its long heritage of culture and entrepreneurship, recovered from the Hitler disaster. Spain and Portugal were ruled by fascists for decades but are now stable democracies. The Dominican Republic became a reasonably well-functioning country after emerging from a suffocating 30-year tyranny. Most leaders who have wrecked their countries came to power through elections. Once in control, they methodically used the tools of democracy to destroy democracy. They have written a playbook that all may read. Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
