Last night, “Evita” returned after a 30-year absence from Broadway. The wait was worth it: This is a big, fat, juicy blockbuster of a show.
Naturally, everybody’s flipping out over the hot new bombshell in town. Usually we mean the actress in the title role, but this time it’s the guy who plays the narrator: Ricky Martin — you may have heard of him?
And does he deliver! Despite being vocally underpowered at times, Martin is a supernova of charisma in the key part of Che, a Zelig-like Everyman always hovering on the side of the action. (A country where every man looks like Ricky Martin must get a lot of tourists.)
This is just one of the many things that Michael Grandage’s lavish, large-scale revival gets right, another being Rob Ashford’s energetic, tango-inflected choreography.
And “Evita” deserves no less than a full-on, high-octane deployment.
Packed with memorable tunes (“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” “Buenos Aires,” “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” “High Flying, Adored”), Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s propulsive, challenging sung-through musical is a modern masterpiece. The only relatively weak bit is “You Must Love Me,” which was written for the 1996 movie and feels generic compared with the older tunes.
In retelling the dramatic life of Eva Perón, Argentina’s former first lady, “Evita” goes for broke. There’s no other option when your semi-mythical subject didn’t just die — in 1952, at age 33 — but “entered immortality.”
Here, she’s played by Elena Roger, a petite, slender Argentine who’s equally believable as a teenager, an ambitious striver sleeping her way to the top, a populist president’s wife and a woman destroyed by cancer.
With her beaky nose and red slash of a mouth, Roger is an outstanding actress; it’s no wonder she was nominated for a 2007 Olivier Award when this revival originated in London.
Far from a saint, her Evita can be sexy, prickly, demanding, capricious. You easily understand why men fall for her, notably tango singer Agustín Magaldi (Max von Essen) and Col. Juan Perón (Michael Cerveris, in glorious voice).
Roger isn’t quite as convincing as a singer — we’re far from early Evitas such as Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone. Her upper range can get shrill and unsteady in “A New Argentina” and “Rainbow High.” And she worms rather than barrels her way through “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” which seems here like an intimate plea with her countrymen rather than a self-centered lament.
Roger moves well, and at barely 5 feet tall, she stands out in a large ensemble — even when Martin’s nearby, which is saying a lot.
Overall, the show has lost the subversive edge of Harold Prince’s original staging, trading a stylized, minimalistic black box for Christopher Oram’s outsize, realistic sets.
But there’s no denying the nearly physical impact “Evita” has on an audience. The woman and the show are back for good. Don’t keep your distance.