Evita was always one of those musicals that I was going to see before I turned 25. As it happens, I beat the mark by exactly 8 days. In 1976, collaborators Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice put together a rock opera that would eventually turn into a stage show and made Patti Lupone a gay icon.
Plot synopsis:
Bitch had it coming.
Musical review:
I went into this musical with only one expectation: the chick singing Evita would sing Don't Cry for Me Argentina, and she'd sing the sh** out of it. That's actually all I asked for out of the $100 I shelled out for two seats & gas. I did not expect to get a history lesson, nor to find the lead male dirty-hot.
I felt kind of stupid when this guy dressed as Che Guevara came onstage about 5 minutes in, sang the hell out of some song, then was carted offstage by the military authorities. To be honest, I had no idea who he was supposed to be - even after they started calling him Che. There were three reasons for this:
1) I thought Che Guevara was Cuban, not Argentinian
2) I didn't really know who Che was, other than that face on t-shirts worn by upper-middle class suburban American teenagers trying to be subversive.
3) I didn't expect a poor, dirty revolutionary would be related in any way to the social climber that was Eva Peron.
Anyway, it turns out that Che was upper class, the child of doctors, and spent an entire year (paid for by daddy) motorcycling across Latin America. See Wikipedia for everything else I learned about Che.
Anyway, the music was good, costuming was good, all performers were talented. Especially this couple who did a 10-minute tango routine towards the end, dressed in red and with a red spotlight on stage. I'm not really one for dance, but it was pretty cool.
Rating: 2.5/4 for the music (good, not inspiring), 3/4 for the staging and production, 3.5/4 for the dirty hot Che.
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