Beneath my bed are hundreds of programmes collected over nearly fifty years of theatre-going. They are the physical record of all the most profound and life-changing stories I have seen on stage, an archive underpinning my dreams. Somewhere in those boxes is a souvenir programme from the original London production of Evita in the 1970s. I didn’t see it, I would have only been five years old at the time. I imagine my parents dressed to the nines, heading into town, children left at home with a babysitter, out for a special night in the West End.
There are more Evita programmes under that bed - Michael Grandage’s production with Elena Roger in the 2000’s. Various Bill Kenwright touring versions. The recent Jamie Lloyd iteration at the London Palladium with Rachel Zegler. Evita has threaded its way all through my life. It has stitched itself into our collective theatrical memory. Ever Evita.
I remember the sight of the 7” vinyl single, Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, rotating on the turntable. The rainbow flash logo of MCA records spinning around and around. We kept the record player in the dining room. I can picture that room, always in half-darkness, the curtains always closed, protecting the heavy mahogany dining table from sunlight. On special occasions, like my first Holy Communion, we would open the curtains and pose for photographs to commemorate the event. In one photograph, my mother, captured in studied repose, sits like a Queen in a high backed chair, legs crossed, make-up immaculate. A hat, wide brimmed. Silk blouse in a rich claret. A tailored cream suit by her favourite designer, Gina Fratini. Decades later I would meet Fratini and tell her about my mother’s wardrobe. “Your mother had taste,” she replied. Taste, elegance, poise.
The record spins.
“Don’t cry for me Argentina,
The truth is I never loved you.”
That misheard lyric: never loved you. I never questioned that lyric, I just accepted it.
Only years later did I realise my mistake. Never left you. Evita’s aria is about fidelity. I had heard abandonment. Throughout my childhood my mother remained unknowable to me, distant. I never wondered about her story, what her dreams might have been. Children don’t, do they? They accept what is given.
I am in that photograph, next to my mother. Standing awkwardly in a velvet suit and frilled shirt, apart from her, close enough, but not touching. Even at that young age I had learned to be comfortable with distance. Love did not present itself to me as intimacy, it arrived as presentation: beautiful clothes, artfully arranged photographs, a perfect display. Love was not tactile, it was not given a voice.
It would take time for me to hear that voice. That misheard lyric came because I had not yet been taught how to listen.
That is how Evita arrives for us first. She enters as a voice. Evita was released first as a concept album, Julie Covington the first woman the public ever heard sing the role of Eva Perón.
I love the original recording. Covington is extraordinary, her voice nuanced and vulnerable. She brings steel and strength but also sweetness. Even so, heard from this distance, her Eva feels incomplete. Covington breathes life into her but does not give her form. It is the inverse of how the libretto imagines her. In production we see Eva before we hear her. She appears on cinema screens in the opening moments. This instructs both the onstage audience and the audience in the auditorium to understand that her presentation, her image, will be central to how she will be known.
But Covington’s Eva arrives as invocation. She is not yet a character, but a calling. She is summoning Eva Perón into existence. Before she is politicised, before she is psychologised, even before she is embodied, she must first be called into being.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical positions Eva Perón as an icon of reinvention. Her journey from illegitimate child to First Lady and spiritual mother of Argentina is framed as a rags to riches narrative. Eva manipulates and exploits her own image, shifting from brunette to blonde, from hand-me-downs to couture and from a raw, high rock belt to a more restrained, impassioned lyric line. The musical itself has also benefitted from reinvention across the decades as, one might argue, has Lloyd Webber’s career.
We are, I think, always reinventing ourselves. I recognise now my mother’s own reinvention, her love of designer clothes, her carefully curated presentation. These were her way of choosing how the world would see her before it decided for her. Coming to London from Dublin in the 1960s as a teenager she embraced the possibility it afforded her to create herself anew. As would I, when the time came.
In all the various ways it could, the world let me know that I did not belong. I was uncomfortable in my skin. At one visit to my father’s workplace I learned that he called me “a bit of a fairy”, at school the Head of Physical Education nicknamed me Nancy, a name that stuck for seven years. I heard the whispers in the playground, the sniggers in corridors. Nothing about me felt right. I felt, every day, as if I was performing a role without a script.
Performance is frequently framed as concealment. I didn’t know the vocabulary of ‘masking’ back then and I wasn’t diagnosed autistic until much later. For those who are taught that they do not fit in, performance can become a form of salvation. For me, performance offered a structure that enabled me to pass unnoticed. I learned, quickly, the language of the world, the grammar, the rules, the narrow definition of acceptable behaviour. In Evita, Eva does not perform herself into power, she observes the conditions of society, learns the rules, masters them and then rides above them. For a child permanently miscast, Evita taught me that identity does not need to be discovered, it can be constructed. Through Evita I saw it was possible to define my own identity.
Evita arrived on the West End stage in 1978 and on Broadway in 1979. Even so, it belongs unmistakably to the 1980s. The extravagance, the excess, the doctrine of self-actualisation. Margaret Thatcher, herself a noted admirer of the musical, rode in to power the year after Evita opened. With her own army of image consultants and voice specialists, Thatcher, like Eva Perón, understood that power is not only seized, but staged and that reinvention begins with definition.
From Covington’s invocation, from voice without body, Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone, the West End and Broadway originators respectively, brought clear, albeit different, definitions to the role. Together they brought Eva to life.
Contrasting surviving footage of each performance is fascinating. Paige’s Eva is angelic, petite. Michael Billington, writing in The Guardian, described her performance as a series of “lightning impressions”. There is indeed a mercurial element to Paige’s Eva, a delicacy that encourages sympathy even while we can sense the determination below the surface. She is a steel fist in a velvet glove.
LuPone, on the other hand, takes the gloves off. Vocally she is more robust than Paige, forceful where Paige was sweet. Her performance is bolder, larger than life. Where Paige found nuance and elicited sympathy, LuPone is calculating and unapologetic. Paige manoeuvres her way to power through cunning, LuPone seizes it through force. The distinction maps cleanly onto national sensibilities. Paige embodies a British mode that prizes the appearance, at least, of humility, with success framed as the reward for persistence. LuPone represents an American mythology: the American Dream, power claimed openly, celebrating the ascent and valuing the means of arrival as highly as the result.
In defining the role of Eva Perón for the first time, both Paige and LuPone reveal something about how women were permitted to sound and how women in power were expected to look. Both performers came under sustained scrutiny, largely from male reviewers, for their vocal technique during their respective runs; LuPone’s diction, in particular, was frequently questioned. Both actresses have spoken about the demands of the score. LuPone famously lost her voice during the tryouts, and she described the score as being written, “by a man who hates women”. For both performers, Evita proved to be a star-making role, but only by way of intense press scrutiny of their looks and abilities.
Eva Perón had acquired a body and she was already testing its limits.
When I finally left school the first thing I did was change my name. Arriving at Bristol University felt like Eva arriving in Buenos Aires. I was excited to be somewhere, at last, that would recognise my little touch of star quality.
I chose Bristol because, when I applied, it had a much-lauded musical theatre curriculum as part of the degree. On my first day in the Drama Department I learned that the musical theatre course had been dropped. I reacted by throwing myself into productions in the Student Union and didn’t turn up for lectures.
But, in the Union, I had at least found the tribe I had longed for. One summer, in 1994, I remember sitting in the Union bar with my friend Emma, imagining our futures on a West End stage.
“What I hope,” I said to her, “Is that one day Hollywood starts to make musical films like they did in the Golden Age.”
“I can’t see that ever happening,” Emma replied. “Who would want to be in them? Madonna?”
Two years later, in 1996, Madonna did indeed star in Evita, a big-budget Hollywood musical based on the stage show. It kickstarted a revival of the form that continued with Chicago, Phantom of the Opera, Rent, Hairspray and on and on to Wicked.
That period in the mid-1990s was an extraordinary moment in pop culture. It was the last ember of the analogue, pre-internet era, the dying gasp of an age when culture was still largely monolithic. We came together watching the same TV shows, listening to the same music, engaging with the same media. Culture was communal.
In just a few years the world wide web would change how we experienced culture forever. At the time Madonna’s Evita had felt like a refresh. In retrospect it was a reprise.
Madonna’s take on Eva Perón has been widely criticised. She lacks, her critics say, the required vocal ability, the acting polish. She was too famous, too controversial, too much. Yet in the mid-90s she was, I think, at the apex of her cultural power. She does not merely play Eva, she collapses her own mythology into the role, imbuing Eva with some of her own power, presenting her as a global icon. If you weren’t there it’s impossible to describe the scale of publicity her casting generated. As one of the most famous pop stars in the world she may have been the only performer famous enough to carry a project of that scale.
Madonna’s Eva does not need the vocal power of LuPone, the mercurial nuance of Paige, or the elusiveness of Covington. It needs only Madonna. It does not matter that songs were reordered, that keys were altered, that the score was reshaped to accommodate her. This is a redefinition. Eva is no longer voice, or body, or technique. She is a brand. Eva no longer asks for power, or seizes it, for this Eva, fame itself is power. What began as a disembodied invocation, voice before body, has now become image before all else.
The story might have ended there. Concept album to stage sensation to blockbuster movie. From invocation to definition to reprise. What more was there to say? Did Evita have more to teach us? As the cycle reached apparent completion, Andrew Lloyd Webber himself began to fade from the centre of cultural conversation. The voice that once defined the form sounded dated. His work, so rooted in melody and reverence for the voice, was now out of step with a society obsessed with image. The audience were forgetting how to listen.
Evita moves from reprise to revival. From Michael Grandage’s elegant 2006 production, to numerous Bill Kenwright touring versions, Evita returns and returns. The score still shimmers, the role still dazzles but something essential is missing. Revival distills revelation. It invites comparison rather than discovery. We stop listening.
When I returned to London after graduation I believed I was off and rolling, rainbow high. Perhaps I should have listened to Evita more closely. Don’t Cry For Me Argentina appears first as anthem, lifting Eva up, placing her on a pedestal. Eva uses it to declare ‘I am what I made myself’. By the end of the musical it has returned. At the moment of her death it overwhelms her. Lloyd Webber wrote, of that reprise: “It has come back to bite her.”
Within a few years of graduating I was estranged from my family, deep into alcoholism and drug addiction. Like Eva, I had believed self-invention was enough. Whatever early promise I’d had was lost. What I had not understood was that self-invention still requires a voice. Once that voice fractures, power evaporates.
Evita requires us to recognise that power needs to be spoken into existence. We have always had to listen to her before we see her. Even the real Eva Perón began on the radio, arriving first as a voice before she moved to film. Evita’s relevance has always been in its capacity to tell us how power sounds now, not how it once did. We must move forward.
What, then, comes after revival?
The director Jamie Lloyd has refined an aesthetic that strips theatre back to its elements: voice, body and audience. In divesting musical theatre of all that had come to define it, he requires us to hear Eva once again.
It isn’t remotely coincidental that when I began rebuilding my life after finding sobriety one of my first acts was to stage a one-person musical revue, called Scorch Song. In a small pub in Dalston to twenty or thirty friends, I performed two dozen of my favourite musical theatre power ballads including, of course, Don’t Cry For Me Argentina. It was from that performance that I found my way back to musical theatre and back to myself. I had been lost and on the verge of giving up and close to death. Musical theatre guided me back.
In those songs I found, not nostalgia, not revival, but reinvention. A voice that needed to be heard again, that still had something to offer. That same urgency is what shapes how Evita must now speak to a new audience.
Rachel Zegler brings youth, global fame, superlative acting, and exceptional vocal technique. She has risen to fame in the era of parasocial connection. We believe we already know her. There is an immediacy that no Eva has ever had before. She is not an unknown asking to be discovered, she arrives with reach and recognition. She enters the conversation with her power already established.
By eschewing the usual theatrical artifice and replacing it with the language of a rock concert, Lloyd and Zegler show us how power is constructed in real time. Evita once again teaches us how to listen.
Zegler’s performance of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, delivered from the Palladium balcony directly to the crowds gathered below on Argyll Street, and to the millions watching on screens around the world, is a breathtaking coup-de-théâtre. In reinventing both staging and context, the production merges theatre, celebrity, and political spectacle into a single moment. The result is historical and reverential and radical and provocative all at the same time. Lloyd Webber is once again at the heart of the conversation. An almost fifty year old stage show sounds dangerous once more.
If there is anything for me after reinvention then perhaps it is resolution. In a dining room that exists only in memory, a record still spins. A child mishears a lyric; “I never loved you,” when what was being said was “I never left you.”
I come from a family where our stories are private. My mother holds her own story close. Musicals taught me how to empathise with someone else’s story but I am still learning how to listen to my own.