Evita

Synopsis

The story of Eva Peron of Argentina - the poor girl made good, champion of the people, wife of the President and charismatic speaker who died young. Made into a film starring Madonna in 1996 where it won an Oscar for Best Song (a new song not in the original stage show).

Our Review:

22 June 2006

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 stri...

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Latest User Review

Morten Aagaard - 11 May 2011:

One of the best musicals I've seen. I loved the music and the actors. Look forward to see this on Broadway in 2012...

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