Word: evitas
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...blame them? Over her nearly 15-year career as pop-music chameleon, sometime movie star and cultural provocateur, few have been able to avert their eyes from Madonna for too long. Her new film, Evita, which opens Christmas Day in New York City and Los Angeles and in January around the country, has been trumpeted with a publicity campaign so lavish and long winded that many people probably think the movie has already opened and they've already seen it. Evita is, to be sure, in many ways a landmark: the most ambitious musical Hollywood has turned out in years...
...role, taking just a measly--by movie-star standards--$1 million fee and even forgoing a percentage of the profits. She personally lobbied the President of Argentina for the right to film at the Casa Rosada, the Perons' official residence. She felt an almost mystical identification with Evita, another ambitious woman who was both revered and reviled during her lifetime and wore neat clothes...
...other person Madonna managed to win over was Andrew Lloyd Webber. (He and Rice had sold the rights to Evita but retained approval of the casting.) In 1993, when Madonna was involved in an earlier effort to make the film, Lloyd Webber was quoted as saying she was too old to play Evita. "What I said was that by the time anybody gets around to making the movie, she'll be too old," he now explains. Vocally, he admits, Madonna did not come to the role with the powerhouse pipes of such stage Evitas as Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone...
...have produced--dare we say it?--yet another Madonna, softer, more chastened. Or maybe just more calculated. The former shock mistress brought tears to Oprah Winfrey's studio audience when she described feeling her baby kicking on Mother's Day. Department stores may be pushing the dolled-up "Evita look," but Madonna has switched to pastel colors, soft makeup and a demure, Catholic-schoolgirl hairstyle. (She donned the Evita look for the film's Hollywood premiere, but otherwise, she says, "it's something for special occasions. You're not going to see me with my hair up in a chignon...
Still, she admits she has "made a lot of really stupid decisions" in her movie career, and she clearly hopes Evita will put all that behind her. Two future movie projects have already caught her eye: a biography of Tina Modotti, the photographer and political revolutionary, and a movie version of the musical Chicago (in the role Bebe Neuwirth currently plays in the hit Broadway revival). "While I'm still very interested in making music and writing music, I want to concentrate on film more. I'm very interested in directing. I know that sounds very trite and boring...