Vogue of the Age: Carrion Chic

By T.E.Kalem

EVITA Lyrics by Tim Rice; Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Argentina's renowned man of letters, Jorge Luis Borges, has characterized her as a "common prostitute." That scarcely fazes Messrs. Rice and Lloyd Webber and Director Harold Prince as they bestow on Eva Duarte Peron some of the epic dimensions attributed to her by her ardent worshipers, the descamisados (shirtless ones), the poorest of the Argentine poor.

In the view of the gentlemen who fashioned this pop quasi-documentary set to music, Eva was spunky, iron-willed, flagrantly corrupt and a canny mistress of horizontal levitation. With few visible qualms, Evita trades on the voguish temper of the age, which holds that however sleazy, venal or decadent a person is, his or her rise to the top confers chic, even upon moral carrion.

Evita is a spectacular eye-catcher, but it seldom gets a grip on a playgoer's feelings. For one thing, the basic tale has been too oft told. It is the familiar show-biz saga of a nobody from nowhere who, through wile and gumption, achieves wealth, fame and glory as a dazzling superstar. In the case of Evita, this tale has been telescoped and occasionally tampered with. Most of the key events happen offstage. They are described in song and dance and recitative, but not dramatically rendered, so the musical lacks the warming pulse of intimacy.

The show is astutely structured to elicit some sympathy for Eva (Patti LuPone) and to present her as something of a scrappy feminist. It begins with her funeral and ends with her death. In flashback, she flees from her barren pampas birthplace to glamorous Buenos Aires, arriving as the amorous baggage of a cornball bari tone guitarist (Mark Syers). She soon acquires a sardonic shadow, a one-man Greek chorus in the anomalous figure of Che Guevara (Mandy Patinkin). Che dogs every step of Eva's checkered ascent through calculated boudoir encounters and forays into stage, films and radio un til she meets, seduces and marries Juan Peron (Bob Gunton) and comes to wield an awesome share of his dictatorial power. The idea of using Guevara as a moral commentator and social conscience is quintessentially farcical, but Patinkin pours Brechtian acid into the role.

LuPone is incendiary as Eva, but she seems to burn with the borrowed fuel of the legend rather than internal charismatic combustion. As Peron, Gunton subtly alternates the wariness of a man walking through a political minefield with the sweaty lust for power engendered by his pint-size Lady Macbeth.

The Rice-Lloyd Webber score is inferior to their work in Jesus Christ Super star. While ingratiatingly melodic for the most part, Lloyd Webber's tunes seem to have been composed by the British equivalent of ASCAP anonymous. Rice's lyrics too often rely on straw-clutching rhymes. The dying Eva plaintively asks, "What is the good of the strongest heart/ In a body that's falling apart?"

Larry Fuller's choreography neatly underscores Eva's isolated eminence. A group of calcified aristocrats in full evening dress shuffles across the stage spewing venom at the people's "saint." In counterpoint, an army platoon in full re galia does an absurdist parody of close-order drill while scurrilously sneering at "Peron's latest flame."

Harold Prince directs with pile-driving force and thereby sacrifices the characters' personal emotions to visual and aural dynamics. If, as in Sweeney Todd, he has tossed away the key to the human heart, he is a master strategist of the stage. He deploys his acting troupes with brilliant precision at a crackling tempo. It is Prince, aided by a huge gray screen whose cyclopean eye brims with historic film clips, who hurls the dramatic thunderbolts of the evening. In two scenes of mass turbulence, with banners flying and the crowd in a hypnotic roar, Peron and Eva turn their microphones into rhetorical firebrands, and Prince engulfs play ers and playgoers alike in a demagogic inferno.

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