Word: evita
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...background. The script contains not a single line of spoken dialogue, unless you count Pontius Pilate yelling. "Twenty-two! Twenty-three! Twenty-four!" while Roman guards put Jesus to the lash. The rest is music numbers of the sliding, dazzling quality that marks the composer's better-known Evita and the lately revived Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat...
Alton's Peron is a Machiavellian, if occasionally befuddled, politician. And R. Michael Baker's Che stands as a deserving counter-Force to Alstay's Evita. He's on stage almost throughout the show, jumping, running, kneeling--seldom content to stand silently as Evita becomes increasingly popular and disingenuous...
Like the recent television docudrama based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Evita presents itself as newsreel-supported fact, leading to an occasional gap in credibility. While it seems reasonable to expect audiences to understand that some of Evita is fiction, for instance, the revolutionary narrator is superfluously identified as Che Guevara. As the program notes. "Che and Evita never met... when she was at the pinnacle of Argentine politics. Che was a student in medical school." Characters never even refer to Che by name. "I don't know why they didn't just call him Juan, or Roberto," Baker...
Other lyrics evoke laughter of a different nature, "Screw the middle classes!" Evita demands. Sometime thereafter, she sings, "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," whose introduction contains the cliche-ridden lyric. "You wouldn't believe it/ Coming from a girl you once knew/ Although she dressed up to the nines/ At sixes and sevens with you." An otherwise wonderful "High Flying Adored" includes this unusual rhyme; "I'm their savior. That's a what they call me/ So Lauren Bacall me." Fortunately, though, the last lyrics are overshadowed by stage action as Evita rushes back and forth, gradually transforming herself...
...resign themselves to a somewhat imperfect theatrical experience, a small price to play for seeing the show here at all. Several minor performances, especially Jill Geddes' as Peron's former mistress, rival those of the leads. Above all else, Webber's consistently haunting and melodic score makes an Evita ticket a worthy investment...