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If the word Argentined exists it would be a useful way of describing what has happened to Evita in its new Michael Grandage production.
Amazingly it has been 30 years since Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber started to work on what remains their best score.
But in that time the show has always belonged to the West End, Broadway or Hollywood, where Madonna made the film.
Now, largely thanks to the central casting, the show has returned to its roots.
Elena Roger is from Argentina and in a dazzling British debut she plays the role for what she was - a country girl made good among the bright lights of Buenos Aires. Much of the choreography is based on the Tango, and Lloyd Webber's new orchestrations also have a distinctly South American flavour.
But Rice rightly takes the first credit. The musical was his idea, and it's brilliantly cynical, witty lyrics set the tone for what has become in the new staging a darker show, as much about Evita's decline and death as about her brief European triumph on the Rainbow Tour and, at home, her astute takeover of her husband Juan Domingo and his nation.
This Evita opens with a lengthy newsreel of her state funeral and from there on Grandage treats it as a drama, getting us far away from the glossy spectacular that was the Hal Prince original.
And there's another change - the narrator is no longer a young Che Guevara but instead an anonymous onlooker who steps out from the crowd at crucial moments to tell us what is going on, and remind us of the cynicism of Evita's bid for sainthood.
Philip Quast is impressive as Juan Domingo, but the evening belongs to Roger, who is mesmerising from the beginning in her desperation to escape, via Peron's bed, from a boring and poverty-stricken small town life.
Often set in shadows, and surrounded by the crowd that she knew so well how to play to, this Evita is acted out on the borderlines of politics and showbiz.
Now we take for granted the idea that all statesmen are really actors in very thin disguises, it is easy to forget that Evita was one of the first to realise just how much it mattered to play the balcony to the crowd, and in that sense 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' becomes an anthem of electoral triumph.
The lyrics, which thanks to the vast improvement in stage sound we now get to hear more clearly than before, brilliantly capture the essence of Evita's appeal, whether she is demanding "Come and adore me, Christian Dior me" or the narrator is congratulating a weeping crowd at her funeral for "getting all of the misery right".
Grandage's edgy, staging has the kind of choreography by Rob Ashford that manages to advance the drama without bringing it to a grinding halt.
All in all this is a brilliant rediscovery of a show we thought we knew, but whose dark heart we had overlooked.
© The Express
