Evita – New York City Center

Solea Pfeiffer in Evita at the New York City Center. Picture: Joan Marcus

Evita continues at New York City Center until 24 November 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Evita, the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice rock-opera celebrating Eva Perón, the legendary and still-controversial mid-20th century first lady of Argentina, is resurrected with reverence as the annual gala presentation of New York City Center.

And there can be no doubt that the powers at City Center mean to give Eva Perón her due, with a production that boasts a female director and a 27-person company of predominantly Latino performers.

The director is Sammi Cannold, who in an interview published in Forbes Magazine, told how she saw the show in high school and became so fascinated with the Eva Perón’s rise to power and adulation that she took a grant-funded research trip to Argentina while in college and then directed the play as her thesis.

She has since gone back to Argentina twice for more research. (In an interview in the show programme, Cannold also gives a deeply appreciative nod to the work of Hal Prince, who directed the original productions of Evita in London in 1978 and a year later on Broadway.)

Her goal for the City Center production, Cannold stated, is to humanise the iconic figure in the white ballgown (the one Evita wears while singing the show’s signature tune ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’), to reveal a woman in dialogue with her younger self, examining her life and motivations.

Much has been made in pre-show publicity that two actresses play Evita in this production. Maria Reficco, a 19-year-old American-Argentinian, plays Young Eva in her teenage years, and Solea Pfeiffer portrays the older Eva until her untimely death from cancer at age 33 in 1952. It’s an effective gambit when we see the slight-looking Reficco being brutally pushed from one man to another, depicting the oppression and victimisation Evita suffered growing up.

Still, it’s Pfeiffer who does much of the heavy-lifting in the show, taking over the role early on in the midst of the ‘Buenos Aires’ number, showing Evita climbing the social, professional and sexual ladder of the city. Young Eva, however, does reappear, presumably in Eva’s memory, during several crucial points later, but her appearances are more optic than anything else.

Pfeiffer brings almost a saintly demeanour to the role, a saint who also looks great in the swanky costumes by Alejo Vietti and handles impressively the copious sung-through score, both vocally and dancewise. The saintliness is pushed forward at the show’s start, with Evita’s signature white gown hanging above the open set like a holy relic, as the people gather to mourn her passing.

What’s often missing in Pfeiffer’s makeup, though, is an underpinning of earthy seductive verve. Her cool ambition is to be admired but it’s not galvanising.

More compelling outpourings come from Jason Gotay as Che, the narrator figure representing the voice of the underdogs in the populace, a rebellious voice. His vocal putdowns of the accomplishments and fury at the damage brought to Argentina by Evita and her quasi-dictator husband Juan Perón have both clarity and fire, or at least as much clarity as Tim Rice’s crowded libretto allows. They might have been heightened also if Enrique Acevedo’s depiction of Perón were a more substantial target, his persona being fairly colourless.

The show’s most vibrant sequences come when the ensemble takes over the stage with the excitingly expressive, tango-heavy choreography of Emily Maltby and Valerie Solomonoff in such numbers as the aforementioned ‘Buenos Aires’ and ‘And the Money Kept Rolling In’, in which the legitimacy of Evita’s charitable work is questioned.

And the glory of Evita remains Lloyd Webber’s score, certainly one of his best, if not his best, with its overflow of melody, surging tempos and inherent drama, set by the haunting, hesitant tango of the oft-repeated – but always effectively so – ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’.

The music is realised in its full sumptuousness by the 24-piece orchestra, conducted by Kristen Blodgette and perched majestically above the playing area.

The aural sumptuousness is matched by the occasional sumptuousness of the set, designed by Jason Sherwood and lit by Bradley King, when tiers of white flowers fill the stage. They rise into the hang space as Evita’s life moves into action and then descend again at other times in increasing numbers.

Even is the show doesn’t succeed on all counts, the flowers like a lot of other elements of this Evita, signal indubitably: “Look at me, remember me, I’m a gala, I’m special.”

Ron Cohen