'Evita' (music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice) is an odd musical (or opera, as they call it). It's the story of the life of Argentine First Lady Eva Perón (1919-1952), and it basically casts her story as a Greek tragedy, or perhaps a riff on the medieval morality play. It begins and ends with her funeral, and in between we see her rise from obscurity to the upper echelons of public life through the sheer strength of her ambition, only to die at the height of it all. In Argentina (at least among older people), you'll find a sharp divide when it comes to Eva Perón: to some, she's basically a saint, and to others, she was selfish and power-hungry and singlehandedly precipitated the downfall of her country. Anti-Peronists, at any rate, conventionally think of her as a shadowy figure, the power of darkness, the irruption of barbarism, a colossal sham. 'Evita' basically adopts this anti-Peronist view of Eva. It glorifies her glamor and, in its own way, celebrates her fighting spirit, but, at the end of the day, she dies on stage consumed by the emptiness of the life she has built for herself. The audience walks out of the theatre having thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle and probably a little ambivalent about Eva's dizzying rise and fall.
The production of 'Evita' that I went to see this past Friday at New York City Center was special for two reasons: first, this year is the centenary of Eva Perón's birth; and, second, this production was directed by a woman strongly invested in historical accuracy. To have read about Eva Peron's life is to realize two things about the musical: first, that her life was very complex and that, therefore, no work of theatre can accurately encompass everything in it; and, secondly, that the musical's portrayal of Eva's life as basically a shadowy vacuum of blind ambition is a faithful representation of a key way in which Eva's life was (and still is) interpreted by certain people.
The production at New York City Center incorporated in various ways the suggestion that Eva's amoral life was a product of her circumstances, which isn't a new idea. Anti-Peronists have long implied that Peronism is the product of problems in Argentine society. (Peronists, of course, would say something entirely different.) Not being Argentine, I suppose I'm better off not taking sides, but I was, however, enriched by hearing the perspectives of people I got to know during my semester in Buenos Aires. At any rate, 'Evita' at New York City Center was very well-done, and I'm glad I went. 'Evita' blatantly aestheticizes history, and, whatever that means for politics, therein lies its strength as a musical tragedy.