Evita
Adelphi Theatre

Sam Jones

EVA Perón once allegedly said: “I will return and I will be millions.” So here we are again, 24 years after I saw the lovely, late Stephanie Lawrence bringing Eva Perón to life at the Prince Edward theatre.
Evita is showing its age – some of the songs are very 70s with naïve, old-fashioned chords.
Still, director Michael Grandage has put together a satisfying night.
I remember being completely beguiled by Eva Perón’s story, first through Julie Covington’s Eva on the original “concept album” then in the opening hype watching an extraordinary documentary on Eva’s disappearing corpse.
She died aged only 33 in 1952 but she and her husband, Juan, ruled and plundered Argentina with a potent mix of brutality and celebrity
Then when David Essex, as the original narrator Ché, topped the charts with Oh What a Circus, which starts with the monotone chants of what could pass for the Latin mass, I was, by then, sitting bolt upright.
I don’t know why Argentinian Elena Roger was brought in to play Eva. A British actress could have shone in that part.
The petite Roger with an expansive grin so like Cate Blanchett is perfectly adequate but not charismatic and inspiring with an occasionally distracting accent.
Lorna Want, as Perón’s rejected teenage mistress, took five minutes to upstage her with a pained, bewildered version of Another Suitcase in Another Hall.
Philip Quast’s hulking Perón and Matt Rawle’s Ché were also good.
The original score has survived largely untouched.
You Must Love Me, written for Madonna’s film version, is included – inexplicably as it slows the pace almost to a standstill.
And it is pacey, musically frenetic in Grandage’s trademark way with plenty of excitement.
Christopher Oram’s set is rather bulky for this size stage but is clever, an elegant, generic Buenos Aires frontage whose walls slide in and out like the staircases at Hogwarts.
It’s another sure winner for Grandage who has, it seems, a real touch for the musical genre.

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