The crowd roars and the vast, unsmiling curtain-call cast line the stage with the leading man bare-chested and covered in blood. No, this isn’t director Jamie Lloyd’s “Sunset Boulevard” — it’s his “Evita”. And that’s not all that these two productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals share. With weapons-grade lighting and sound, this pulsating West End production is almost “Evita – The Rock Concert.” But while it delivers in spades for the sensation-generation, something major is missing. That something is storytelling. Newcomers, likely to be baffled, need to read a synopsis beforehand since detailed characterization and plot are wholly sacrificed to spectacle.
“They must have excitement,” sings Rachel Zegler’s Eva Peron. That’s this show’s defining quality. Out go Hal Prince’s original, legendary black-box production, and Michael Grandage’s more Argentina-authentic revival (on which Lloyd was assistant director). The production it most resembles is the one Lloyd himself directed in 2019 at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre with the same design team, choreographer and set: a plain gray, stage-wide staircase of six risers.
That’s extremely good for stark presentation — the serried rows of hard-working, gesticulating dancers can always be seen — but it also flattens out the drama. Because almost everything happens in so characterless a space, individual scenes have no sense of location or atmosphere. Games of hierarchy based on how high up they are on the stairs are being played, but they barely register since the story is so illegible.
Before the show opened, the internet was awash with videos and much-clicked-on stories about “artistic differences” between the director and his leading lady. You’d never know it from Zegler’s astonishingly assured, excitingly committed vocal performance. Her sound is carefully, thrillingly produced. Her money notes catapult the crowd and she’s never less than exhilarating right though her wide vocal range.
Then, with the first preview, came the reveal of Lloyd’s latest piece of video work, a move that made it an item on BBC primetime news and in the New York Times. Borrowing Ivo Van Hove’s use of a character going outside the theatre on camera before being filmed returning to the action in his National Theatre/Broadway staging of the movie “Network,” Lloyd famously made the inside/outside live filming central to his “Sunset Boulevard.” He then filmed Tom Holland on the roof during his production of “Romeo and Juliet” and now he places Zegler’s Eva on an actual balcony mimicking Peron’s Casa Rosada that sits handily above the London Palladium entrance.
There is absolutely an intellectual case to be made for showing Eva addressing a real crowd as around six hundred or so members of the public nightly gather outside the theatre for free to look up and watch her sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” In the theater, meanwhile, up to 2,286 audience members watch the live, multi-camera filming of her and the crowd on a letterbox screen the width of the notoriously wide stage.
Since we see her in immense close-up in the famous wig and costume, we’re not precisely robbed of seeing the star perform the show’s greatest hit (and later we do witness her sing the less powerful reprise). But unlike the recent “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in which the multiple camera/video games were a brilliant elucidation of novel wholly dedicated to image, here it seems like mere display. Theater works on a human level connecting performer and audience. Seeing the show’s literally iconic moment on video leaves us admiring of Zegler but emotionally disconnected. All we feel is Eva’s — and Lloyd’s — manipulation.
More problematically, it’s the first time we’ve seen another side to Zegler’s Eva. Until this point she has been directed to present her character, posing in black bra and shorts throughout the first act, solely as a woman exuding sex with a non-stop sneer. Nothing develops or changes. Looking at the audience, she presents monotonously as being entirely knowing — but what she knows remains a mystery because all nuance is banished.
That’s true throughout. Even one of the score’s tenderest moments, in which Juan Peron’s mistress sings “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” falls victim to the demand for constant high voltage. Because actor Bella Brown has been directed to become resentful, the last section of her song is robbed of pathos.
For all that the show belongs to Eva, she needs strong supporting men. Diego Andres Rodriguez prowls about, suitably sly and snarling as Che, the narrator, but he cannot have a relationship with a cipher. He ultimately strips down to briefs (black, natch) so that two men can murder him by pouring buckets of blue, white and red paint over his gleaming body — the colours of Peron’s political party and the aforementioned blood. He fares better than James Olivas (as Peron himself), whose carefully displayed musculature cannot make up for a lack of gravitas. His song with the generals, “The Art of the Possible,” is imaginatively staged but in story terms is indecipherable.
Full marks to Lloyd’s team for constantly whipping up audience excitement by maintaining resplendent aggression throughout. But in Rice and Lloyd Webber’s most ambitious show — which charts not just rise of a complex (anti)heroine but populism curdling into fascism — it’s hard not to feel that their material is being short-changed.
Not that many will care since choreographer Fabian Aloise’s dancers are near-ceaselessly striking poses, stomping and displaying attitude in unison across the steps. But for all their startling power and sweat, the heavily gestural choreography is presentational rather than dramatic. You admire the dancing, not the dance.
Yet even they are not the busiest people on the show. Step forward deputy stage manager Jo Dunne calling the literally hundreds — possibly thousands — of cues demanded by Jon Clark’s incandescent, show-defining lighting.
A deserving Tony-winner for “Stranger Things,” Clark starts with acidic side-light cutting through more smoke than a burning building. That gives way to scalding down-lighting, dazzling banks of brightness and pulse-quickening chases, thrillingly meshed to the score played by Alan Williams’ razor-sharp, roof-raising, 18-piece band via Adam Fisher’s sound design (which is less good on detailing the lyrics). The buttons Clark slams on numbers leave other shows reeling.
This is, undoubtedly, a technically flawless achievement. And no one will complain about not knowing where their ticket price cash has been spent. But dazzling though it is, there’s something faintly decadent about abandoning the depth of Rice and Lloyd Webber’s strongest achievement for a thrill-ride display.
