Evita, London Palladium review - even more thrilling the second time round

Would Jamie Lloyd's mind-bending revival of Evita win through twice in four weeks, I wondered to myself, paraphrasing a Tim Rice lyric from his 1978 collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber?

This is the first Lloyd Webber musical I ever saw in its original production on Broadway, which is to say the storied Hal Prince staging that brought Tonys to all concerned, including co-stars Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.

But could my visceral response at a press preview be equalled several weeks later once all involved had settled into their (too-short) run? As the show itself puts it in a different context, the answer is yes.

Not everyone may be up for the wild ride that goes with Lloyd's full-throttle approach to the work, which surpasses in its kinetic connection the same director's reimagining of Sunset Boulevard, recently finished on Broadway. But while some will forever argue the toss of an Evita that for them is too much, my advice to interested playgoers is simply to submit to the production and see where it deposits you two hours later. In my case, I emerged breathless with admiration, whilst also brooding upon the darker recesses arrived at this time round by material that had never before felt so, well, modern - sensual and scary, the two conjoined to intoxicating effect. Upon first viewing, the adrenalin rush of the arena-like approach slays you on a subliminal level, inducing what Eva herself might have called a "rainbow high". A second sighting, in my case seen in the company of 40 or so visiting American playgoers, deepens one's understanding of the granular detail of a staging that couples conceptual daring with all number of revelations along the way to a devastating finish. I admired Lloyd's take-no-prisoner approach to this same title in 2019 at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, reminding us that Evita began life on disc as a rock opera during Lloyd Webber and Rice's rock god phase, and belongs to that world as much as to the theatre: indeed, Beyoncé's Coachella appearance in 2018 has been cited as Lloyd's inspiration.

But in the six years between the Regent's Park version and this one, the world has changed in ways that only deepen Lloyd's investigation of Eva Peron's long-ago (to today's audiences, anyway) fame as a prism that opens on to contemporary notions of celebrity worship, demagoguery, and a society obsessed with surfaces. 

When the astonishing Rachel Zegler, every inch a bikini-clad rock chick in the title role (with Bella Brown doing a few Mondays), exits the balcony of the London Palladium, having assured hordes gathered every performance in the street below during "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" that "every word is true", you're immediately reminded of this most fabled of solo numbers as a masterly essay in manipulation. Truth suddenly elides into falsehood, as befits a slippery age that has seen fit to twice elect as president Donald Trump, who, indeed, has cited this very show as one of his favourites. Probably not a great idea to mention that fact to the original Broadway Eva, the feral (and brilliant) LuPone.

And so we have, courtesy designer Soutra Gilmour, the same bleachers as in Regent's Park, the sound contained indoors in a way that wasn't possible alfresco and allowing for a musical saturation that owes a lot to the subtle genius of musical supervisor and MD, Alan Williams - who won an Olivier fulfilling the same chores on Sunset. In the later Lloyd Webber show, Lloyd and his astonishing choreographer, Fabian Aloise, worked wonders with their ensemble arrayed before us, staring down the audience with a sternness that immediately made one reassess the kitsch in which Sunset itself is marinated. Jon Clark's lighting here allows for piercing illuminations and dusky shadows as required, Zegler a sexually voracious vamp on the make one minute, a coolly bejewelled queen the next. 

All the while, Aloise's incomparable company writhes, shape-shifts, and flips its way into various configurations that in their own way correspond to the pliability of an easily moulded populace who thrill to Eva's anger - "screw the middle classes!" she shouts, announcing herself as one with the shirtless descamisados in thrall to this pint-sized dynamo and her strongman husband, James Olivas's muscle-bound, beautifully sung Peron (pictured right). He, in turn, is quick to assert his annoyance "that you have to fight elections for your cause / the inconvenience, having to get a majority". Sound familiar? So too does talk about Eva's actions "justified by my foundation": political chicanery hasn't changed factually one iota, even if the faces have moved on. 

The show's resident outsider/onlooker is the mysterious Che, once representative of Che Guevara but latterly the unspecified embodiment of dissonance who is gradually silenced as the production continues. Any diminuendo may come as a surprise given the sterling vocals brought to the part by the electrifying West End newcomer Diego Andres Rodriguez - like Zegler, still in his early 20s - an alum of Sunset on Broadway who seizes this role by the scruff of the neck in a way I've not seen since Patinkin. (We'll pass politely over a fey Ricky Martin's attempt at this part on Broadway.)Arguing at the start that "the best show in town was the crowd", Rodriguez's ceaselessly limber Che (pictured above) seems in an instant to describe an age in which the masses are easily brought to heel (the post-Diana mood in London comes to mind) and to look forward to the decision to take this musical's best-known number quite literally to its public - the trump card (sorry) of the conceit of Eva on the Palladium balcony evident to those of us in the auditorium who witness a layering of images that lands to blistering effect: Zegler's ever-wily first lady sips fizz as if giving a quiet "up yours" (a phrase from the show) to the adoring throngs below. I had thought I didn't need to hear "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" anytime soon, and now I can't shake this production's shivery re-evaluation of it. 

Che's ideological tussle with Eva takes physical shape during the second-act "Waltz for Eva and Che", in which the pair parry and thrust like on-again/off-again lovers, both of them soon to go down for the count: Eva as she succumbs to cancer, with Zegler delivering a gossamer-pure rendition of "You Must Love Me" added for Madonna in the film, and Che covered in paint the colours of his country's flag barely able to gasp a climactic report as to the fate of Eva's corpse. 

Those confused by the narrative may be intrigued to hear that Prince's approach back in the day was itself a series of thrillingly coordinated tableaux vivants: the substance of the piece is delivered straight to the gut, not in the thinly diluted Wikipedia-adjacent manner favoured elsewhere.

In her one scene as the discarded mistress, Brown, the alternate Eva, delivers a thrilling master class in seizing one's moment before slipping away into anonymity, the show's essential love affair definably that between Eva and her own ego. "I love you and hope you love me," she sings during "Don't Cry For Me Argentina", the lyric here configured so that it is spoken directly to Zegler's own reflection. Politics, we learn anew, is vanity, which itself curdles so easily into venality. You leave the show stunned by the stagecraft throughout and the audacity with which a musical allied to a rapidly receding past rings out anew. And, yes, you're also shaken by a realpolitik that, since 1978, offers increasingly little to sing about. 

• Evita at the London Palladium to Sept 6 

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