ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER is reviving his hit musical Evita after a gap of more than 20 years and will cast an Argentine actress in the title role of a new £3.5 million production.

Elena Roger, 31, will have her British debut in a “more authentic” version of the story of Eva Perón, the wife of Juan Perón when he was the autocratic President of Argentina. But Lord Lloyd-Webber’s team is being careful not to overdo the authenticity — Roger will be given elocution lessons to tone down her heavy accent.

“I will have lessons before I leave London and then before the rehearsals,” she said at a press launch in the capital yesterday. “I will have very strict training. I also have to do some working from home.”

Roger is an established actress in her native Buenos Aires, where she has performed in adaptations of Saturday Night Fever and Les Misérables.

Michael Grandage, the director of the London production, said that he and Lord Lloyd-Webber had cast her because, whereas British and American actresses had tried to emulate Elaine Page and Madonna, Roger would base her performance on Eva Perón.

Both the composer and Sir Tim Rice, the lyricist, had felt that they needed to update the musical because their previous version, which ran from 1978 to 1985, was hampered by the difficulty of researching Argentine culture. The country was in the middle of the dirty war, a seven-year campaign by its Government to eliminate dissidents.

“For a long time I felt that Tim Rice and I, and especially me, didn’t know that much about Latin American music at the time,” Lord Lloyd-Webber said. “There’s so much more Latin American music available to us now. I wanted to look at the orchestration again. We are approaching it from a completely different perspective.”

The show will have an additional song, You Must Love Me, which the composer wrote for Alan Parker’s film adaptation starring Madonna and Antonio Banderas. It won an Oscar for Best Original Song in 1997.

Roger said that she intended to portray Evita as closely as she could to the real Eva Perón, who died in 1952. She has visited her mausoleum in the opulent cemetery of Recoleta, in Buenos Aires, and studied several biographies and documentaries. Grandage, who recently directed Ewan McGregor as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, said that he would be careful to preserve the iconic scenes, such as Evita’s appearance on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, that had made the first production a success. “You reinvent the songs at your peril because they are so perfectly placed,” he said.

He will introduce tango scenes and some tap dancing. “We now have access to a city and a country that perhaps we didn’t the first time around. There’s MTV and many more books now. We know so much more about it. We are hugely helped by having an Argentinian playing Evita.”

Evita will open at the Adelphi Theatre, London, on June 2.

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