Ignore the whingers and haters. Rachel Zegler is an absolute smash in Jamie Lloyd’s thrilling revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s improbable hit musical about Argentina’s populist, postwar first lady Eva Perón.
The 24-year-old packs an impossible amount of slyly insouciant star power into her tiny frame and proves to have both stage presence and a passionate, expressive vibrato — amazingly, this is only her second major professional theatre role, after playing Juliet on Broadway last year.
The already infamous moment when she performs Don’t Cry for Me Argentina from the Palladium balcony to a crowd outside — relayed to paying punters in the auditorium on a screen — is a bravura piece of directorial panache and social commentary from Lloyd. This is a finessed version of his stripped-back Evita at the Open Air Theatre in 2019, the showmanship and expressionistic sensualism amped up, the whole thing supercharged by Zegler’s white-hot presence.
See also: How to watch Rachel Zegler's performance of Evita from the street
In the interim between that staging and this, Lloyd has essayed glitzy, celeb-led reworkings of Sunset Boulevard (which won an Evening Standard Award for Nicole Scherzinger in London and a Tony award for Best Musical Revival on Broadway) and three Shakespeare plays. He also suffered something of a critical backlash for his supposed reliance on stars, monochrome minimalism, and sending his actors on video walkabouts or stripping them to their underwear.
Zegler meanwhile, feted at 17 for her role as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s reboot of West Side Story, was cruelly monstered and personally vilified over the subsequent failure of Disney’s live-action Snow White. Even if it didn’t play a part in their original plans, There’s a definite frisson in seeing these two singed Icaruses collaborate on a work that meditates on the treacherous nature of popular opinion.
Written in 1976 — after the pop-religious romps about Joseph and Jesus with Rice, and before the imperial phase of Cats and Phantom — Evita may be Lloyd Webber’s most fully realised work. The juxtaposition of sacred music and tango, the way songs and themes loop and flower throughout the score, particularly Don’t Cry For Me and Oh What a Circus, is elegant and beautiful. Another Suitcase in Another Hall, sung by the mistress whom Eva has supplanted, sees the composer and lyricist at their melodious, bittersweet best. Rainbow High, given full welly by Zegler, is a banger.
Lloyd mounts the show on a stage-wide staircase topped by the giant letters E-V-I-T-A, emblematic of the young María Eva Duarte’s man-by-man climb from poverty to mononymous fame and power. Zegler appears in a bra-top, shorts and boots, sable hair bedraggled and a challenge curling her lip as Eva bed-hops upwards to the place where spotlights flare and streamer cannons explode. She only puts on the iconic blonde wig and diamonds — familiar from the real Evita, previous stage iterations, and Madonna on film — for the balcony anthem, indicating that it’s a pose.
If the sexual politics sound stuck in the 1970s, she’s not the only one objectified. Evita’s flirtatious, revolutionary opponent Che is played with cocksure swagger by Diego Andres Rodriguez, whose only recorded previous credit was in Lloyd’s Sunset Blvd on Broadway; he’s beaten bloody, slowly disrobes during his slinky duet with Eva, and ends up in his pants covered in paint.
James Olivas’s granite-faced Juan Perón comes from an identikit parade of bare-torsoed, gym-pumped generals (the Peróns’ working-class followers were known as “the shirtless”). Political assassinations are carried out by a hard-bodied dancer in a peaked cap. Women twerk and flex, men pull hench poses, and Fabian Aloise’s muscular choreography reeks of sex. The simplicity of Soutra Gilmour’s designs extends to the colour-coding of greys and Peronista powder-blue.
Great theatre can be about many things: star quality, spectacle, the lightning-in-bottle capture of a moment, the alchemical power of song or speech on a bare stage. In this Evita, all those things come triumphantly together.
Evita at London Palladium, until September 6, tickets and information here.
