“She’s a diamond in their dull gray lives,” sings the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón of his wife in “Evita,” Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sung-through musical about Eva Perón. She was a former matinee star whose popularity among the working classes bolstered support for her husband’s government, and “Evita” expresses some skepticism about political populism. Yet a new revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd and running at the London Palladium through Sept. 6, is emphatically populist in its relentless bombast, heavy symbolism and button-pushing grandiosity.
The initially moody staging — industrial gray metal stairs, smoke effects, dark costumes — belies the sensory overload ahead: Balloons are popped; lights are turned up blindingly bright; blue and white confetti rain down on the audience. Rachel Zegler (“Snow White” and “West Side Story”), making her West End debut, is a delight in the title role, strutting bossily in a black leather bra and hot pants while a chorus — representing soldiers or ordinary citizens — cavorts elaborately around her to a brassy tango-inspired soundtrack, delivered by an 18-piece band. (Choreography is by Fabian Aloise, lighting is by Jon Clark and set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.)
The show begins and ends with Evita’s death from cancer, at the age of 33, in 1952. In the intervening two hours she is goaded and reproached in song by Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), a wisecracking Everyman in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts, who teases Evita for cozying up to an authoritarian leader and sleeping her way to the top. In one song he quips bitterly, “Don’t you just love the smack of firm government?” (For this impertinence, he is later killed — doused with fake blood, then with blue and white paint, the colors of the Argentine flag.)
Evita is portrayed as a cynical, ruthless social climber, and the audience is invited to sympathize with the people she hurts along the way. She unceremoniously dumps a boyfriend — the tango singer Agustín Magaldi (played with hangdog charm by Aaron Lee Lambert, who sings beautifully) — once he has ceased to be useful to her. And she breezily steals Perón (James Olivas, physically imposing but stiff — and thus convincingly military) from his girlfriend (Bella Brown), who sings a doleful song before vanishing, never to be seen again.
Much preshow hype surrounded Lloyd’s decision to stage the famous scene in which Evita sings the show’s signature tune, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” on the theater’s exterior balcony; members of the public see the spectacle in the flesh, while theatergoers make do with video footage beamed onto a big screen in real time.
Lloyd is repeating a trick he deployed last year in the Tony Award-winning “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Tom Francis delivered the title number while walking on West 44th Street accompanied by a team of cameramen. (In the original London production, the actor roamed the Strand.) In that instance, the cinematography paid a subtle tribute to golden-age Hollywood, using filters to create a 1950s look; here, the location switch is a metaphor for populist messaging, with the first lady literally turning her back on the great and the good to address herself directly to the people.
This tireless critic loitered outside the theater during a preview show to experience the extramural performance firsthand. A substantial crowd, having gathered patiently for an hour, emitted an endearingly tentative “whoop” when Zegler materialized on the balcony to deliver a dignified rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” followed by a second, more agitated number in which she tells the crowd she was once just like them. The entire segment lasted about six and a half minutes, and the stunt has generated the kind of social media buzz that money cannot buy.
Watching the same scene from inside the auditorium on opening night, it was noticeable that the camera did not linger for very long on the assembled crowd — for fear, perhaps, that the sight of the iPhone-wielding fans, supposedly transmuted into the huddled masses of the Argentine working class circa 1950, might break the spell.
Zegler sings impeccably, and brings an arch quality to Evita’s hammed-up badness — a knowing, self-satisfied smirk here, an imperious raised eyebrow there. But in a rare moment of introspection, when she gazes fretfully into a backstage mirror, she does not wholly convince. This is as much the fault of the play as the performer: Evita has been given so little interior life that the foray into psychological realism feels abrupt and forced.
“Evita” started life as a concept album in 1976, and when it was turned into musical theater a couple of years later, the transition was only partly realized — it feels more like a series of songs than a story told through song. Reviewing the 1979 Broadway production for The New York Times, Walter Kerr lamented the summary nature of Rice’s narrative, which he described as “like reading endless footnotes from which the text has disappeared.” This weakness persists, and is compounded in this production by an emphasis on noise and atmosphere. In some numbers, especially when more than one performer is singing, it can be hard to make out the words or to follow the action.
None of this matters much. If this “Evita” sometimes has the feel of an extended trailer, that’s because its primary artistic goal is not to tell the story of Eva Perón, or even to say anything profound about authoritarianism, but to celebrate, as loudly as possible, the cultural phenomenon that is “Evita,” the musical. It is an exercise in meta-kitsch, and, on those terms, it succeeds.
The director is on a roll. Lloyd’s “Sunset Boulevard” won seven Oliviers and three Tonys, and this “Evita” looks like a sure hit; he’d love to take on “Jesus Christ Superstar,” he told reporters last month. Lloyd Webber has found, in his near-namesake, the ideal collaborator — someone who can imbue his back catalog with enough contemporary credibility to save it from oblivion. In this respect, the two men are not unlike Mr. and Mrs. Perón — one has the power, the other has popular clout.
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