The curtain rose at the Prince Edward Theatre on a cinema in Buenos Aires. The audience saw a film flicker to a halt and heard an announcer declare the death of Eva Perón. Then, from the back of the stage, a figure in a white suit emerged to sing ‘Oh What a Circus.’ This was Che, the sardonic narrator, and the opening of ‘Evita’ by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The production cost £350,000. Elaine Paige played Eva, and David Essex was Che. The staging was stark and cinematic, using projections and a mobile set to trace Eva’s rise from obscurity to the balcony of the Casa Rosada.
The musical mattered because it represented a second, more audacious act for the Webber-Rice partnership after ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’ It took a divisive, recently deceased political figure and presented her not as a subject for a biography but as an engine of pure theatrical force. The score blended Argentine tango and milonga with rock opera, creating hits like ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.’ It treated history as raw material for myth, a process the musical itself explicitly dissected through Che’s cynical commentary.
A common misreading is that ‘Evita’ glorifies its subject. The show is deeply ambivalent. It presents Eva Perón as a relentless social climber who harnessed charisma and the nascent power of mass media. Che constantly undercuts the sentiment, questioning her motives and the cult that formed around her. The musical is less about Peronism than about the mechanics of fame and political iconography. It is a show about the construction of a saint, aware that it is participating in that very construction.
Its legacy is twofold. It cemented the mega-musical as a dominant theatrical form, a path Lloyd Webber would follow with ‘Cats’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ Politically, it introduced Eva Perón’s story to a global audience that knew little of Argentine history, freezing her in a specific, theatrical pose. The 1996 film adaptation with Madonna only amplified this. ‘Evita’ did not document a life; it created a durable, contested icon for the stage.