Was it a night of a thousand stars for Rachel Zegler’s Evita?
The show is now open at The London Palladium
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London
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2 July 2025
In case you’ve been living off grid for the last few weeks, Rachel Zegler is making her West End debut as Eva Perón in Jamie Lloyd’s reimagined Evita at The London Palladium (until 6 September).
Her balcony performance of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” made headlines after being live-streamed indoors and delivered street‑side, and critics have finally weighed in with their own verdicts!
Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage
★★★★★
“This Evita might be regarded as the apotheosis of Lloyd’s mid-period style and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice should be down on their knees thanking him for allowing their strongest, darkest show, first seen in 1978, to gleam with diamond-sharp brilliance.
“There was a dry run for this production at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2019, and the lineaments of that version are here. Soutra Gilmour’s set of stacked bleachers with the brilliant band (under the supervision and direction of Alan Williams) at the top, and her stylised costumes, still strip away all period settings; Jon Clark’s lighting sculpts and glistens, beginning bright, full of warm sun and rich purples and reds, but getting progressively darker as the story of Eva Perón, wife of the dictatorial president of Argentina, reaches its close.”
Sam Marlowe, The Stage
★★★★★
“Zegler’s astonishing vocals, swooping between sweetness and grit, are as undeniable as her megawatt charisma. She’s potently matched by Diego Andres Rodriguez as Che, the show’s renegade narrator loosely inspired by Che Guevara, who starts out as Eva’s kindred spirit and becomes a voice of conscience – one she firmly represses. Here, in one of Lloyd’s most arresting images, he’s destined to be stripped almost naked, savagely beaten and drenched in blood – only to return, defiant, to deliver history’s judgement.”
Nick Curtis, The Standard
★★★★★
“James Olivas’ granite-faced Juan Perón comes from an identikit parade of bare-torsoed, gym-pumped generals (the Peróns’ working-class followers were known as “the shirtless”). Political assassinations are carried out by a hard-bodied dancer in a peaked cap. Women twerk and flex, men pull hench poses, and Fabian Aloise’s muscular choreography reeks of sex. The simplicity of Soutra Gilmour’s designs extends to the colour-coding of greys and Peronista powder-blue.”
Alice Saville, The Independent
★★★★★
“As in his wildly successful revival of Sunset Boulevard, Lloyd’s approach here is to match the maximalism of Lloyd Webber’s luxuriant score with sumptuous, all-enveloping imagery while simultaneously cutting through that richness with moments of surprising irony. Evita’s discarded lovers look like bewildered middle-managers who’ve been handed their notice. An adorable child, dressed just like Evita, smiles sweetly at a charity fundraiser – then grabs a fistful of banknotes like a tiny gangster.”
Listen to our free podcast review of the show:
Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph
★★★★★
“The close-up camerawork catches a tactical tear as she sings “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” — nigh-transformed into a Disney princess in a ball gown — then the flash of triumph as those gathered outside the Palladium applaud on cue. It’s Lloyd’s masterstroke.
“Evita could almost be too cool for us to care about — yet the go-for-broke momentum reveals redeeming cracker of vulnerability. The demand to be adored eats Evita up, before cancer claims her. Discreet camerawork relays her doubt at a dressing-table, as she takes off her wig, and those fake tears turn to the real thing after she sits dumped, cradled by a fickle Perón, and sings the night’s climactic weeper “You Must Love Me.” As indeed, we must.”
Fiona Mountford, The i
★★★★★
“Lloyd is not a director inclined to bother with the faff of scenery, meaning that our attention here is rewardingly re-angled towards the words and music. There is a stage-spanning flight of steps, over which the ensemble pound in Fabian Aloise’s pulsating choreography. The performers are clad in black-hooded raincoats, which are subsequently discarded to reveal costumes for passing characters. The look for Perón (James Olivas) and his cronies might best be described as Cabaret-does-military-dictatorship, with its sleeveless shirts and bulging biceps.”
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times
★★★★★
“It’s youthful, angry, hopeful. But the exhilaration segues into something more sinister. The blue and white ticker tape raining down as Perón is elected feels almost oppressive; that same tape spills from white balloons as they are popped each time a dissenter is silenced. Spectacle splices with violence; the atmosphere feels electric, loaded.
“There is a price to pay for this approach: the intense volume can feel relentless, you lose too many of Tim Rice’s sharp, witty lyrics and, with them, some narrative clarity.”
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out
★★★★
“Opening the second half, the balcony sequence is a study in pure artifice… the crowd are both Zegler’s adoring public and in a brilliantly cynical stroke, they’re also Evita’s: the chance to see a star sing her song has essentially led to the public volunteering to serve as extras in the propaganda broadcast that we in the theatre are shown on a big screen.
“But the Eva the outside audience sees is a lie: wig, dress and her sense of empathy are torn off before she returns to the stage. It’s a pitch-perfect mix of theatrical audacity, political satire and deft cinematography. It strikes me as remarkable that anyone watching inside could possibly feel short changed, especially as the song is reprised several times – I suspect the negative headlines were based on troll posts or people so incurious about theatre that maybe they shouldn’t have bothered.”
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian
★★★
“It’s hypnotic but the narrative takes a backseat for this rock musical, which is almost entirely sung through, with what feels like thin connective tissue in its story. You see Perónism slipping into authoritarianism but don’t quite understand how. In Lloyd’s previous staging, the character of Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez, also the singing narrator) wore a Che Guevara T-shirt to let the audience know who he was. Now he is in black, and for those who are new to this story he might remain anonymous.
“There is an approximation to the characters as a whole, with very little focus on Perón’s interiority. Maybe that is not the point, but how then can the audience feel the tragedy of her untimely death – which takes up so much time in the second half of the musical – if they cannot connect with it emotionally?”
Clive Davis, The Times
★★★
“I’d be genuinely surprised if newcomers to the show have a clue what is happening for much of the evening as this dressed-down, concert-style spectacle, enhanced by Fabian Aloise’s streetwise choreography — with a smidgen of twerking too — rattled through Eva Péron’s journey from aspiring performer to the centre of power in 1940s Buenos Aires. Call it TikTok musical theatre, if you like. Everything is radically compressed, and for all the verve of the ensemble dancing you’ve no time to tease out the meaning of a song before the next one crashes down upon you.”
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