Evita

A sure test of a great show is that its second major production can compete with the impact of the first. That was the case at the Adelphi Theatre when Elaine Paige, the originating star of Evita, the 1978 musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, was on hand on this revival’s opening night to acclaim her successor, the equally diminutive Elena Roger.

Hal Prince’s original staging was a Brechtian chronicle of political intrigue and social climbing. Michael Grandage, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, with his regular designer Christopher Oram, has realised the fuller operatic potential of the score, placing the action within the huge, crumbling colonial grandeur of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, where Eva sings her signature number, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” an ambivalent hymn to her own celebrity.

With an Argentinian, Ms Roger, playing the lead, Lloyd Webber and his co-orchestrator, David Cullen, using a much more string-based and guitar-led rhythm section, have gone back to tango basics. So, for that matter, has the brilliant choreographer Rob Ashford, whose funeral chorus at the announcement of Eva’s death (she died, aged 33, of cancer, in 1952) segues silkily in flashback into her relationship with a lounge singer (“On This Night of a Thousand Stars”).

At this point we seem to be in Lorca territory, with black-veiled choric women supporting and bemoaning Eva’s death and adventures. The narrator Che, whom David Essex originally made a self-contained Guevara poster pin-up in beret and battle fatigues, is re-imagined by Matt Rawle, in a pained, casual yet sexually-charged performance (taking his cue from Antonio Banderas in the 1996 Alan Parker movie) as a critical, distant lover. He’s not an observer but a fully engaged coeval.

This allows Roger’s bird-like, steely Evita to shuttle dispassionately between the rival advances of Rawle’s cynical Che and the mountainous Juan Peron of Philip Quast (so much expressively better than the inert Joss Ackland in the original), while cementing her public persona with the peasants, the “descamidos”, or “shirtless”, and the audience. The girl from the sticks ends up on the balcony.

No one listening to this score with open ears can doubt its integrated mastery of rhythm, the quilt-like cross-quotation between big numbers, the cleverness of the underscoring, the melodic surge of the big numbers, the vitality of the Big Apple/Buenos Aires item that documents Eva’s metropolitan destiny; or, indeed, the unselfconscious brilliance with which Rice and Lloyd Webber use the Evita legend to raise perennial modern issues of charitable foundations, social climbing, sexual attraction and political manoeuvring.

The political rise of Peron was first done as a game of musical chairs; now it’s an elegant wrestling bout, with each sinister participant vividly characterised. And Eva’s arrival as Peron’s new woman is poignantly registered by the evicted mistress (Lorna Want) in one of the show’s best songs, “”Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” pointlessly commandeered by Madonna in the movie. Eva’s famous “rainbow tour” – “They need to adore me, so Christian Dior me” – to win friends in Europe, is another gloriously detailed sequence, with pointed, witty lyrics and real dramatic momentum, and the beautiful waltz for Che and Eva is now followed by the haunting song Rice and Lloyd Webber wrote for the movie (it won an Oscar), “You Must Love Me”.

Roger hits the heights in all the right places, exuding a firm interior charm as well as a knowing, calculated aura that’s new to the role. Tiny as a bird, she soars to the challenge. And she dances magnificently, buoyed along by a superbly drilled chorus and some genuinely breathtaking moments of ensemble staging. There’s no more exciting performance in London: a truly great musical has been famously restored.

- Michael Coveney