Word: evita
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...brisk afternoon in late April, and the Evita crew has set up shop outside a small white church in a suburb of Budapest. They are filming the wedding of Eva and Juan Peron, and 100 or so onlookers from the neighborhood are watching Jonathan Pryce and Madonna, as the Argentine general and his bride, emerge from the front door, wave and get showered with rice--then repeat the sequence half a dozen times. One person in the crowd is not watching the actors: a tall, well-muscled man, standing with his arms folded, named Bob Izzard. Each time the cameras...
...looking for M.D.s," Izzard explains. That's security-guard lingo for "mad dashers"--people who dart out of the crowd without warning and try to touch the star. In Buenos Aires, where the Evita crew spent its first five weeks of filming, M.D.s and other unruly fans were a big problem, and Izzard had to get the help of a six-man security detail. Budapest is more laid back--but so are the police. When the cameras roll, they too stare at Madonna...
...Evita It might have been an Oliver Stone political screed or a Ken Russell hallucinogen; the lead actress might have been Meryl Streep or Michelle Pfeiffer. But here it is--20 years after Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber first produced their gorgeously cynical opera about Eva Peron--reimagined through the eye of director Alan Parker and the flesh of Madonna. The take is dense and studious, an aptly conservative adaptation of a pop classic; it lets the score seduce and the star shine. Madonna, who is up to the vocal demands of the role, makes Eva--sexual predator, social...
...sultry magnetism. But this is, essentially, a three-character play, demanding that the stars must sing, swagger and act with style. Pryce, consummate pro, lives fully in all three realms. Banderas parades his sex appeal as the one man who is not a father figure to Evita; he is the skeptical stud who can match her arrogance with...
...times, exasperations. At first a star more famous for attitude than for voice, she proved, in the 1990 Dick Tracy, equal to the sere demands of Stephen Sondheim's songs. Here again she does a tough score proud. Lacking the vocal vigor of Elaine Paige's West End Evita, Madonna plays Evita with a poignant weariness, as if death has shrouded her from infancy. And dressed in sumptuous gowns or feeling life seep away, she has more than just a little bit of star quality. Just before Eva's death, she sings the film's one new tune, which sounds...