Rekindling the Flame of ‘Evita’

NEW YORK —  In the course of an interview in the early ‘50s at the Casa Rosada, American journalist Fleur Cowles asked Eva Peron, “What makes you happy?”

The famed first lady of Argentina, wife of dictator Juan Peron, smiled and invited the female reporter to accompany her that night to a rally at a large theater in Buenos Aires. The two women were led through a back entrance to a stage where they could hear the murmur of a crowd from behind the closed curtain. When the curtain rose and the audience caught sight of its first lady, pandemonium broke out. The glamorous, impeccably dressed Peron went to the podium and, lifting her arms, acknowledged the cheers of “Evita! Evita!”

She turned back to Cowles, winked, and said, “This makes me happy!”

Larry Fuller, who choreographed the original 1979 production of “Evita,” the classic Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber pop opera, recounts this story, told to him by veteran showman Harold Prince, director of the Tony-winning production that opened on Broadway in September 1979.

“Hal heard the story from Fleur herself,” Fuller recalls, “and it sort of epitomized for us what drove this woman who grew up poor and illegitimate from a one-street town in the pampas. That’s what makes her so fascinating, so dangerous and so timeless. She lived for that roar of approval.”

The curtain is going up once again on “Evita,” in a production that opens Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, before coming to Los Angeles’ Pantages on May 12, 20 years after the show’s U.S. premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The current tour premiered last November in Detroit and will reach Broadway in September. Fuller has returned to the show not only as its choreographer, but he is also re-creating Prince’s original staging. Still, this production is new in one major aspect: For the first time Latino actors play all of the leads.

Natalie Toro, playing Evita, is of Puerto Rican descent; her alternate, Ana Maria Andricain, who sings three performances a week of the vocally exhausting part, is Cuban American, as is Raul Esparza, who plays Che. Juan Peron is played by Raymond Jaramillo McLeod, whose mother is from Spain.

“We felt that Latinos would give it a more authentic, more up-to-date casting,” says Fuller, sitting in the conference room of the show’s New York producers. The Missouri-born choreographer made his Broadway debut in the chorus of the original production of “West Side Story” produced by Prince and went on to dance in such classics as “The Music Man” and “Funny Girl.” On this day, he is a trim and youthful presence in a black outfit that contrasts dramatically with the blood-red poster of “Evita” behind him.

“We weren’t foolish enough to limit ourselves. These roles are very, very difficult. Twenty years ago, the talent pool for Latino actors who could play these roles was virtually nonexistent. But that’s changed. And we were just lucky that the best people for these roles just turned out to be Latino.”

Fuller recalls that the first rehearsals for the show were, well, a bit overheated, particularly when it came to Toro and Esparza. “I told Natalie, ‘Your soul is on fire, your passion just spews out of you,’ and she said, ‘Well, that’s the Latin temperament.’ And I told her, ‘Well, we have to orchestrate that.’ And so now, there are times when she pulls back into herself and there are times when she just lets it rip.”

A dividend of that passionate approach, in Fuller’s opinion, is that there is a sexual tension in the relationship between Evita and Juan that he says had been missing in past productions. (A much smaller-scaled production toured the U.S. from 1992-1994.) “Ray’s a very sexy-looking man, and he knows how to play it. They really get that sexuality cooking,” he says. “If you don’t get that, then the relationship between them doesn’t make any sense. [Otherwise] she becomes this totally cold and calculating woman who’s just going to bed with this cardboard man to get ahead.”

After “Evita” opened in L.A. in 1979 to a warm reception following its triumphant London premiere--the first major salvo of the British invasion to follow--it received mixed-to-negative notices on Broadway. Many critics accused the show of glorifying Fascism with its riveting portraits of two charismatic leaders who brutally silenced the opposition and exploited their constituencies for political gain--particularly los descamisados, the lower-class, blue-collar “shirtless ones” who revered the Perons, particularly their Evita.

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Fuller believes the show was misunderstood in ways that the political experience of the intervening decades should clear up. “The intention and concept is actually the opposite of glorifying,” he says, describing the musical as a cautionary tale. “The point is, it’s important to look behind the political packaging. No matter how lovely the ribbons, it could be an old rotten apple. Twenty years later, we’ve become very jaded about what’s happening in politics. It’s a lot harder to put over the half-truths and the lies. But people should recognize the attempt, and the Perons were very, very good at it.”

Fuller says it’s difficult to gauge what impact the 1996 movie of the musical, directed by Alan Parker and starring Madonna, might have on the current revival. Only moderately successful in the U.S., the film was a huge moneymaker abroad, particularly in Latin America. Fuller feels the movie failed on two counts: “I thought Madonna was perfect casting, playing a character of questionable talent, questionable morals with a genius for marketing,” he says. “But they took all the conflict out of the character of Eva Peron, homogenized her so she was this pleasant nice lady in fabulous costumes and hairdos.

“They portrayed her as a woman who slept her way up, but once in power, there was nothing ruthless or dangerous about her. Therefore Antonio Banderas, as Che, got to play all the conflict and, in my opinion, walked away with the movie.”

Neither of the two songs written for the film, including the Oscar-winning “You Must Love Me,” are included in the revival, which is mostly faithful to the Broadway original, with the exception of some new “Latin-ized” orchestrations and a more authentic tango, which Fuller has put into Juan and Evita’s courtship dance, “I’d Be Very Good for You.” Neither Fuller nor Prince had ever seen a tango before they staged the 1979 version. Since the original concept album had been banned in Argentina, they didn’t feel safe traveling there to research the musical. Fuller has yet to visit Buenos Aires, but he has supplemented his knowledge through biographies of the couple and the touring tango shows that have been very popular of late. “That male-female struggle for the position of control in the tango is a perfect metaphor,” he says.

The director-choreographer, who has also worked with Prince in mounting his “On the Twentieth Century” and “Sweeney Todd,” says his research has led him to a fuller portrait of the controversial first lady of Argentina, who succumbed to cancer at 33. “She brought the vote to women in Argentina, and she was obsessive about her descamisados--as self-aggrandizing as that must have been,” he says. “She was tireless. She’d sleep only two hours a night, and the rest of the time she was running around pursuing her own agenda--unheard of in a male-dominated, machismo culture like Argentina in the ‘50s. What she achieved, particularly given her background, was not just a fantasy dream. It was a miracle.”

Looking over today’s political landscape, Fuller says that the figure who comes closest to Eva Peron is Hillary Clinton--”only because she looks likely to pursue power on her own terms by running for the Senate. I don’t think she’s as ruthless as Evita, although, Lord knows, if I had gone through what she’s gone through, I’d have learned to be ruthless just to survive.”

In the end, Fuller believes Evita Peron was a singular sensation, a woman at the right place at the right time who had the guts and instincts to ride her luck all the way to the top.

As she sings in “High Flying Adored,” right after she’s been crowned first lady of Argentina, “I was slapped in the right place at the perfect time, filled a gap, I was lucky, but one thing I’ll say for me, no one can fill it like I can.” *

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“EVITA,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Tuesday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m. (signed for the hearing-impaired); next Sunday, 1 and 6 p.m. Prices: $21-$52.50. Phone: (714) 740-7878, (213) 365-3500. Also: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd. Dates: Opens May 12. Sundays and Tuesdays to Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends May 30. Prices: $42-$67. Phone: (213) 365-3500.