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What's new, Evita (not to mention Buenos Aires)? Quite a lot, it turns out, in Michael Grandage's revival, at times electrifying and at others overearnest, of the last (and, many argue, best) of the four collaborations between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
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Roger commands attention as she is tossed libidinously from one lover to the next during 'Goodnight and Thank You', and she seems to intertwine herself around Philip Quast's outsized Peron both physically and emotionally during 'I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You'. The arc of the Perons' relationship is one of the genuine thrills charted by Grandage, whose immersion over the years in classical theatre brings a texture to a hastily drawn partnership that stays with you long after the curtain has come down. Roger may barely come up to Quast's navel but she posits a tiny spitfire with nerves of steel, whose devotion—she ends 'A New Argentina' looking not at the audience but at the husband who will bring her to power—makes you wonder what these same two performers might be like playing the Macbeths. (Eva even gets a sequence late on where her past flits before her, as in Shakespeare's play.)
Roger's forte as an actress on this evidence lies in tragedy, and she chronicles Eva's descent into illness with real gravity, not teary grandstanding. And once his wife's body gives way, Quast, in another terrific performance from this three-time Olivier Award-winner, himself seems to snap in two, a giant man undone by undying love for a woman who (a neat touch here) haunts the balcony of the Casa Rosada even upon her death, at which point this production sends spinning a bed from which Eva neatly disappears.
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