Evita review — Rachel Zegler is a blank-eyed heroine in a leather bra

Times

7 hours ago

How ironic that the one moment when Rachel Zegler's doomed heroine seemed close to being a three-dimensional figure was during the song that didn't actually happen in front of us. As you've surely already heard by now, Jamie Lloyd has set Don't Cry for Me Argentina on the balcony above the entrance to the London Palladium in front of people in the street below. Those of us inside watch on a video screen.
All credit to the hip young director for having the audacity to smack down the fourth wall. Thanks to Lloyd's ploy, nearly 50 years after the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical about the woman who became the kinder, gentler face of Peronism, the show is reaching out to a social media-savvy audience.
That comes at a cost, though. Zegler, who otherwise spends a lot of the evening in little more than a leather bra and shorts, is reduced to a blank-eyed marionette for virtually the whole show. Her voice is fine but it has to compete with the musical director Alan Williams's wildly amplified orchestra. Too many songs whirl past in a semi-audible maelstrom.
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I'd be genuinely surprised if newcomers to the show have a clue what is happening for much of the evening as this dressed-down, concert-style spectacle, enhanced by Fabian Aloise's streetwise choreography — with a smidgen of twerking too — rattled through Eva Peron's journey from aspiring performer to the centre of power in 1940s Buenos Aires. Call it TikTok musical theatre, if you like. Everything is radically compressed, and for all the verve of the ensemble dancing you've no time to tease out the meaning of a song before the next one crashes down upon you.
When Lloyd brought the prototype of this show to Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in 2019, I thought that Soutra Gilmour's grungy design had a punk aura. Musically, the show now feels more redolent of high-octane stadium rock. This might be how the show would look and sound if you were repackaging it for a huge festival crowd.
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Bella Brown, playing the discarded mistress of James Olivas's youthful Peron (more gym rat than general), adds a rare moment of repose in that haunting farewell Another Suitcase in Another Hall. As the cynical Che who watches Evita's rise to power, Diego Andres Rodriguez provides vocal firepower before stripping off his shirt and being doused in paint. Zegler, who abandons her blonde wig long before the end, is a frail figure tossed from one adoring crowd to another.
Given what miracles Lloyd achieved with James McAvoy in that unforgettable, rap-based version of Cyrano de Bergerac just before lockdown, he has earned the right to try just about anything. But this venture, for all its raw physicality, suggests he's beginning to slip into a formula. Those people waiting in the street to see Zegler on the balcony got the best bargain of all.★★★☆☆140minLondon Palladium, to Sep 6, evitathemusical.com
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