Evita – London Palladium

Rachel Zegler and James Olivas in Evita at the London Palladium. Picture: Marc Brenner

Evita continue at the London Palladium until 6 September 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Don’t cry for me… I’m on a rainbow-high after being (almost) swept away by game-changer Jamie Lloyd’s brash, spare, highly-sexed, intoxicatingly half-naked reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s finest collaboration, the spectacular choreography of Fabian Aloise and the show’s luminous American star Rachel Zegler. Technically brilliant, emotionally not so much.

Comparisons with Lloyd’s bravado treatment of Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard 18 months earlier are inevitable. Did I enjoy it as much? Not quite. But if you’re a lover of rock concerts (I’m not), this is very much your bag.

This isn’t the Evita that ALW and Sir Tim envisaged when they launched Elaine Paige to world stardom with it in 1978 but I can’t believe they aren’t loving this loud interpretation with its now-famous breaking-the-theatre-wall Palladium balcony stunt by Zegler. The latter has already gone viral, brought thousands of curious spectators to the West End and surely guaranteed the show a Broadway transfer after its short, ten-week London run.

The high spot of a two-hour show doesn’t take place inside the theatre at all. Yet delivering a manipulative ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’, complete with blonde wig and dramatic gestures to reduce to rapt silence the chattering community standing in a side street off Oxford Circus is far more than a gimmick.

It echoes the conniving Eva Duarte at the Casa Rosada playing to her own adoring public, the workers, while inside, the well-heeled in their up-to-£245 seats are having to make do with a giant-screen performance, relayed by back-tracking, hand-held cameraman, It is a coup de théâtre and valid political statement all in one.

And every bit as mind-boggling as the stunt pulled by the same director in Sunset Boulevard when he had Tom Francis hurtling from stage through dressing rooms and up the twisty Savoy staircases to The Strand, past startled shoppers, through the foyer and back on to the stage, all the while giving the title song his all.

At first, nobody believed it was happening live. It was a video… or a trick. Now, with Evita it comes as less of a surprise, mostly because the audience now expects something unique to happen – but it still works.

We don’t know much about Eva’s journey from lowly beginnings to ambitious actress to trapping New Argentina’s military hero Juan Perón into marriage and becoming his lucky mascot: ruthlessly shedding her first lover, the tango teacher Magaldi, and others along the road until she reaches the man she wanted. For his part, as long as she is up front being the “high flying, adored”, loved for her beauty and her hold over the working classes, Perón can bask in the reflected glory and rule.

This is a grittier, more politically charged Evita than we are used to unless you had got a whiff of it from Lloyd’s first stab at it at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2019, stripping away the glamour, the diamonds and furs, the ball gowns, the extravagant sets. Props are in short supply, just a few fans, blue smoke, confetti and a giant ‘EVITA’ sign at the back as you might get at a rock concert. Set and costumes are spot-on as usual (Soutra Gilmour) and there is some stunning lighting design by Jon Clark – and the contemporary dance routines earned standing ovations mid-act on their own. Aloise who also worked with Lloyd on Sunset Boulevard (but had less to do) really deserves as much credit as the director as Act It is a riot of dancing, some suggestive and down-and-dirty, a veritable feast for the eye.

But the concentration of style over substance weakens the storytelling to a degree with the result that when Eva’s decline and death comes in the later stages, the scenes do not seem as moving as they were 47 years earlier. Flattened down and sometimes uninvolving, much is right but not everything. The start, slow, sombre and smoke-filled, will have baffled newcomers to Evita. Unless you come armed with some knowledge of post-war Argentine history, it is not always an easy watch.

This Perón is much younger than we remember him and takes some getting used to. In real life, he was twice Eva’s age and has been played that way in early versions of Evita, but here James Olivas looks much closer in age to the tiny but teak-tough Zegler (until she takes on too many tours, pushed over the limit by Perón, and gets terminally ill) and they are diametric opposites in size, Olivas well over a foot taller. A mismatch not made in heaven but arranged for the greater glory of ‘Santa Evita’, the song The Child (Auora Breslin on this occasion from a team of three) sang so perfectly at Eva’s funeral, ironically to indicate her love of young people.

The strapping voice of Aaron Lee Lambert as Magaldi, the first man she latched on to help with her driving ambition, is heard to great effect on ‘On This Night of a Thousand Stars’ and Bella Brown as the swiftly dismissed mistress makes the most of one of the show’s most memorable numbers ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’, but as there is no suitcase or hall in this minimalist production, not all of the original impact remains.

Diego Andres Rodriguez, in his West End debut, is a great scene-srealer as Che, the narrator and protector of Eva who has to misfortune to end up with someone pouring pints of blood and blue paint over him. He is a big talent but the show stands or falls with Zegler (recently seen as Shakespeare’s Juliet on Broadway), only 24 and 5ft 2-inches, already a major talent.

She strains in the rock-heavy Act I to be heard above an intrusive 18-strong orchestra under Alan Williams but that isn’t her fault. When it becomes more tuneful and we get into some of Rice’s cleverest lyrics and ALW’s most beautiful music in and after the balcony scene and in the final love song ‘You Must Love Me’, the Oscar-winning song specially written for Madonna in the movie, Zegler is in her element and we see a true star.

With Boulevard, Lloyd turned Nicole Scherzinger from pop singer into musical theatre royalty and with Evita he’ll do even more for Zegler, a Golden Globe winner for her Maria in Spielberg’s West Side Story but unfortunately seen by more in the widely-panned Snow White. That will be forgiven if not forgotten – not all American movie stars can cut it on the West End stage but here’s one who most definitely can. Brava!

Jeremy Chapman