|
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.
[...]
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.
© Whatsonstage
