EVITA
Phoenix Theatre, London WC2
Opened 2 August, 2017
***

Some musicals seem, like Bob Dylan, to have spent much of their lifetimes on a Never Ending Tour. This is to all intents and purposes the same production, albeit recast, which visited the West End three years ago after 16 months of touring. The Phoenix, however, has less than half the capacity of the Dominion, and its stage is correspondingly smaller. Once Matthew Wright’s basic set of faux-wrought-iron-and-concrete galleries, stairways and balcony have been put in place, there seems to be little room for the cast to be at all demonstrative. The blocking looks flatter even than it needs to be, and also quite basic: people move when they’re required to, otherwise remaining static rather than flowing organically (for where would they flow to?).

I last saw Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical biography of Eva Perón in 2006. In the current revival, in an age when politics is ever more a matter of image rather than substance, Evita’s creation of a whole subspecies of populist icon has much more opportunity to resonate, and yet does so much less. Neither the personal nor the political dimensions attain any depth: the word “disappear” is fraught with horrific and quite terminal meaning in an Argentine context, yet when Evita threatens a cadre of aristocratic ladies with it, they simply flounce offstage as if she’d said not “disappear” but, perhaps, “bum”.

Emma Hatton has a faint echo of Elaine Paige in the title role: her voice on “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” is captivatingly pure and clear, and within a couple of numbers she’s belting lines out without losing any of the clarity. The same can’t be said for Gian Marco Schiaretti as the narrator/observer figure Che: his mangled pseudo-English vowels are usually intelligible but seldom listenable with a straight face. As Perón himself, Kevin Stephen-Jones embodies the adjective I’d use to sum up the entire production: efficient. It gets the material across, but does nothing of any note with it, and in any case there’ll probably be another one along in a little while. Or the same one yet again.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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