Word: evita
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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NONFICTION: Evita: First Lady, John Barnes ∙ Ezra Pound in Italy, edited by Gianfranco Ivancich, photographs by Vittorugo Contino ∙ Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie ∙ People of the Lake, Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin ∙ The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn ∙ The Old School Tie, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy ∙ The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
...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...
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...
NONFICTION: A Place for Noah, Josh Greenfeld · Evita: First Lady, John Barnes · Ezra Pound in Italy, edited by Gianfranco Ivancich, photographs by Vittorugo Contino · First Person Rural, Noel Perrin · People of the Lake, Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin · The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn · The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen