Somewhere among a huddle of actors in a south London rehearsal studio stands Elena Roger. The diminutive Argentinian singer — on whose narrow shoulders rests the burden of leading the revival of one of the 20th century’s most successful musicals — is dwarfed by her fellow cast members. Six weeks before Michael Grandage’s new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita begins previews in the West End, the air, tinged with the first hints of the coming hysteria, is full of barked commands.
“Basic is a six,” shouts the choreographer, “and box is a nine.” “Don’t waste any part of this rehearsal process,” cautions Grandage. “Salve regina, mater misericordiae,” sings the chorus as the accompanist pounds a piano. And there, for an instant, is Roger, tiny beside the Peasant Mourners who are processing in memory of the character she plays: the recently departed Eva Peron. As they lay flowers at a makeshift shrine, you are reminded of the days after Diana’s death — and reminded, too, of quite how much has changed since Evita first opened in June 1978.
Twenty-eight years ago, the Lloyd Webber/Rice partnership garnered the highest box-office advance in West End history for a production overseen by the American director Hal Prince. Moreover, an album of the score had topped the charts two years earlier; and the single Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina, performed by Julie Covington, had spent 15 weeks at No 1. If audiences were unaware of quite who Eva Peron was, and unschooled, too, in the finer points of 1950s Latin American politics, they were nonetheless well acquainted with the songs, and with one tune in particular.
That’s the background, then. Or is it? There is a danger that we forget the climate in which Evita first emerged, and remember only its seven-year London run, its Tony awards on Broadway and that song. Indeed, for all its record upfront box office, few at the time felt confident that a musical about the unknown, long dead wife of a South American dictator was likely to “play” with theatregoers, especially ones for whom Lloyd Webber and Rice meant biblical tales set to music. Indubitably, Jesus Christ Superstar had been a smash hit. The partnership had form, and Don’t Cry for Me was a tune people whistled in the streets. Yet the whole was far more complex and less accessible than that song suggested.
On the other side of the Thames, in a square of towering, stuccoed town houses, the work’s composer fidgets in his top-floor office. His lyricist is late. If you were feeling cruel, you might observe that here, in a nutshell, is the story of their relationship, and the reason for its demise soon after Evita. Where Lloyd Webber is wired, Rice is languid to the point of being horizontal. Post-Evita, the former was raring to go, and charged headlong into Tell Me on a Sunday, Cats and Phantom. The latter seems to have breezed through much of his subsequent career. “When you look at the great partnerships in musical theatre,” says Lloyd Webber, apropos his with Rice, “Rodgers and Hammerstein spring to mind. Rodgers was very driven. Hammerstein was that much older than him. Rodgers just had to write.” Rice is 61, almost four years older than his erstwhile partner.
Today, they seem in the early stages of a rapprochement, like a couple of gauche teenagers, testing the ground but ready to slink back into a sulk at the first perceived slight. They edge around the subject of collaborating again, giving stock answers about finding the right project but ruling nothing out. Both are prone, still, to disagreeing about tiny details to do with productions staged decades ago. And Rice, as is his mischievous wont, has a habit of making comments that appear designed to goad his former collaborator.
At one point Lloyd Webber, with a deliberately arched eyebrow, mentions Puccini, the composer to whom he has most often been (unflatteringly) compared. “I was reading a biography of him,” he begins, “and I didn’t know that he’d tried to do Oliver Twist and Les Misérables. I’d love to have heard his version of Les Mis; he must have written something.” And Rice adds: “Well, it probably went into the next one.” Later, explaining the casting of Roger, unknown outside her native land, Lloyd Webber says: “You should go for the best, not the biggest. If you do go for a megastar, when that star leaves, there can be a perception that the show is not worth seeing. We were worried, when Michael Crawford left (Phantom), that he was the Phantom as far as everybody was concerned.” Cue Rice: “I always reckoned you could say he was still in it because he had the mask.”
But they will also reminisce fondly, teasing out the memories of triumphs and creative tipping points. Here is Rice on Don’t Cry for Me: “One of the criticisms I’ve had to put up with is that it’s just a string of clichés. But that’s what it’s meant to be: it is written as a dishonest political speech.” He’d come upon the idea while driving — late, of course — to a dinner party and catching a programme about the Perons on the radio. Similarly, Lloyd Webber’s music for the song has been accused of romanticising Eva. “If you were trying to win over 30,000 people in a square,” says Rice, referring to the balcony scene in which Eva captures the Buenos Aires crowd, “you wouldn’t give them Stockhausen.”
Lloyd Webber remembers grappling with Rice’s proposed subject matter: “I kept thinking, there’s got to be something I can unlock here. Something that had made a great impression on me was what transpired to be Judy Garland’s final performance at the Talk of the Town. She turned up late, and she was completely and utterly out of it. I’ll never forget the moment she sang Over the Rainbow. People were booing and throwing things. Here was this iconic song, sung by this icon; and it turned on her. I thought, if I can make an anthem for Eva Peron that turns on her at her death, then I’ve done it. We were talking it through, and Tim said, ‘We could musicalise her final broadcast’ — and I thought, I’m away.”
The revival may be the chief talking point, but the show’s significance runs deeper than that. It transformed perceptions of the pair: no longer were they dabblers in the Old and New Testaments. After Evita, they were bankers, Lloyd Webber especially: fillers of charabancs from the shires, packed with fans of Memory and The Music of the Night. Evita launched them on their paths to their current status: Rice with Oscars for The Lion King et al; Lloyd Webber, here in what the eye insists are two, possibly three, London mansions knocked into one, hung with priceless works of art, all glass lifts and sweeping spiral staircases, like a Bond film, the main reception room as big as a tennis court. All that, and a critical reputation that has declined as their fortunes have increased.
Which takes us back, again, to Evita. Many musical-theatre followers who can take or leave Lloyd Webber’s post-Rice works nonetheless swear by Evita, its boldness and complexity, its hyperactive but dextrous melding of pop, chorale, show tunes and dissonance. True believers have no problem whatsoever with the original album sleeve’s description: “An opera based on the life story of Eva Peron.”
The Donmar’s Michael Grandage, whose recent insightful productions of Guys and Dolls, Don Carlos and The Wild Duck make him an intriguing choice as director, is positively evangelical. “It was an iconic moment in musical-theatre staging,” he argues. “It shows phenomenal confidence; not arrogance, just a total command of its brief.” He sees that brief as telling a complicated story that had to be comprehensible to a mass audience while reaching for some degree of empathy even as the work blackens Eva’s name.
To educate his cast, Grandage has strewn period magazines and personality-cult pamphlets about Eva around the green room. But Roger has no need of them; she grew up learning about the real thing. The still, calm voice at the centre of this hubbub, the 31-year-old seems unfazed. An award-winning performer in Argentina, she is stepping into shoes once worn by Elaine Paige and (in Alan Parker’s film) Madonna.
“I am not thinking about it,” she says. “If I do, I will be too scared to go up on stage.” In any case, she adds: “If there are no nerves, there is no soul.” She admits feeling a responsibility to represent Eva accurately, but insists: “This is a show. We need to understand that. It’s not real life.” And Eva’s machinations for power, and the corruption of the foundation she set up, shouldn’t, Roger suggests, obscure the fact that she did benefit the poor (including her own grandparents), albeit capriciously. “She was human. She did beautiful things and terrible things. But the military years were far worse than Peron. Peron was a child.”
Back in the rehearsal space, Matt Rawle, as Che Guevara, launches into “Oh, what a circus, oh what a show”. Well, it’s not quite a show yet, but it’s getting there. Still resonant after all these years — Blair’s demotic platitudinising is a straight steal of the Casa Rosada balcony scene — Evita is back. “The book-less, sung-through style of telling the story is opera at its most pretentious,” sniffed an American critic of the New York production. Oh, well, you can’t win over everyone. But he still called it an opera, didn’t he?
Evita previews at the Adelphi, WC2, from June 2
