THEATRE REVIEW: EVITA
11 Jun'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

STRATFORD — Eva Perón died in 1952, after suffering from cervical cancer. On the other hand, EVITA — the musical inspired by her strange and meteoric rise to the top of Argentine heap, and revived at the Stratford Festival this season — seems to be suffering from a simple irony deficiency.

Premiered in Britain in 1976, that musical — one of a series of hugely successful collaborations between composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice — quickly became, under the direction of the legendary Hal Prince, a major element in the duo’s success, both in London’s West End and in subsequent Broadway and international stagings. Thirty-five years on it has made it here, in a new production directed by Gary Griffen that opened Thursday on the Avon stage. And who knows, it just might enjoy its own success, for certainly there is much in it to recommend.

Principal among its attributes is a committed performance by Chilina Kennedy in the title role, supported not just by equally strong turns from Juan Chioran (in the thankless role of Eva’s husband, dictator Juan Perón) and Josh Young (as an explosive Ché, icon of the Cuban revolution), but by a committed ensemble as well.

Kennedy is a talented performer who has carved a niche for herself on the Stratford stage in just a few seasons. While she is more suited to the character of the young and ambitious Eva, she tackles the role with such determination that she all but convinces us she is a mature, if strident, Eva too. Chioran, another major player here, tackles one of musical theatre’s more thankless roles with both dignity and integrity, leaving no doubt that the Perón story, at least from his point of view, is nothing if not a love story. And while the role of Ché has always been slightly suspect — his story and Eva Perón’s joined only by the broadest possible geographic references — Young makes it his own with an impressive passion and a simmering rage appropriate to a revolutionary who is determined to change the world.

In the show’s two other featured roles, Josie Marasco grabs the opportunity to sing one of the score’s most beautiful songs — Another Suitcase In Another Hall — and makes the most of it, while as the tango singer who launches Eva’s career, Vince Staltari hits all the wrong notes in all the right ways.

Director Griffin works well with both his cast and a technical team that includes choreographer Tracey Flye and designers Douglas Paraschuk (sets), Mara Blumenfeld (costumes), Kevin Fraser (lights) and Sean Nieuwenhuis (video projections).

Griffin approaches this ground-breaking, sung-through work with a reverence that should be reserved for a musical commissioned by the History Channel, not on a slight bit of social commentary meant to be delivered with tongue planted firmly in cheek as it sends up society’s growing obsession with fame for fame’s sake.

Whereas a scene between dueling generals was originally staged as a bizarre and childish game of musical chairs, for instance, Griffin tones down the irony by transforming it into a mere poker game. Worse, he demands that aristocrats and soldiers moving crab-like through the show en masse take themselves seriously and asks that Kennedy, in the famous balcony scene, try to sing Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina — one of the greatest nonsense songs ever written — straight from the heart. It’s a decision that, coupled with wrong-headed and shaky staging, strips the song and the iconic scene of much of its power and grandeur, and bleeds it of irony too.

So it seems EVITA is destined to suffer the same fate as that other celebrated Webber/Rice collaboration, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR; it is diminished by the same tragic voyage from ironic to iconic.