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Evita at the London Palladium – review

ONE only needs to revolutionise theatre once to secure one’s legacy.

Giving a show a contemporary spin is fine, but Jamie Lloyd’s production of EVITA (a reworked version of the 2019 Open Air piece) substitutes decibels for drama.

If ever a subject suited director-slash-mogul Lloyd’s myth-making artistic instincts, this is the one.

Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, it tells the story of Eva Perón, first lady of Argentina from 1946 to 1952.

Perón’s journey was nothing short of extraordinary: born illegitimate and raised in hardship, she defied society norms — adored by the masses, yet mired in controversy.

Rachel Zegler, in fine voice, makes her West End debut as Evita, the icon: a glamorous populist. She stands as both a symbol of female ambition and a cautionary morality.

His monochrome Evita is so alienating – how to put this? – because Lloyd has done all this gimmickry before. And having no emotional centre, this production leaves little impression — only a chill. This pouting Evita evaporates.

Furthermore, Soutra Gilmour’s bare design, with just a set of steps, leaves us little to get excited about. White balloons go pop. Handheld microphones are passed around, a large EVITA sign looms, coupled with a jagged sound. We are told to vote.

To that end, Lloyd’s fragmented production holds you, in a suffocating way. It’s all over-deliberate, metallic, and the nightmarish choreography (Fabian Aloise) doesn’t make the story accessible – it drove me up the wall.

Along the way, the dedicated young dancers push their bodies to extreme physical limits, twerking, spinning and stomping around. Yet they rarely convey identifiable emotions or ideas. Stomp, stomp, stomp.

Anyway: populism, whether left or right, always ends badly. Eva and her repellent husband resented critics. They plotted against the middle classes. They created division.

James Olivas is a strangely laid-back Juan Perón, relaxed to the point of blankness. His singing is, unfortunately, flat. But he’s hot.

Anyhow. As everyone knows, vast crowds are gathering daily outside the London Palladium to watch tiny Zegler sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, the show’s signature song, from the balcony — while paying theatregoers inside see it on a screen.

Don’t Cry for Me— incidentally the actual words carved on Eva’s tomb in Recoleta Cemetery — unfolds at the start of the second act.

Zegler, with her sparkling jewels, blonde hair scraped back, jewellery and a white dress ablaze, is made up to look like Eva briefly, but this is hardly enough to carry the production. Despite her impressive vocal performance, we’re never remotely tempted to cry for her.

Of course, it’s well done for what it is: those who made it are experts at manipulating responses; they are like Pavlov’s dogs, turning the hoi polloi into salivating spectators. Hypnotised.

Meanwhile, Diego Andres Rodriguez as narrator Che— drawing constant attention to Evita’s wiles and weaknesses— sings well.

However, near the end, he strips to black pants, before buckets of coloured paint and confetti tar and feather him. The front row is a splash zone.

Look, the most irritating thing is that Lloyd himself almost seems to be conscious of the minimalist creative pitfalls.
Is he trolling us?

“You let down your people, Evita,” Che sings. She let down the poor, providing cover for a fascist dictatorship, by squirrelling away charity cash, and by distracting from her husband’s protection of Nazi war criminals.

In the end, Evita perishes. It’s no coincidence we don’t care about character deaths. Lloyd’s hip people are uninteresting because characters and individual fates aren’t big enough for certain big theatre directors.

Along with the score, that sinks into a trough of repetitiveness, blue confetti at half time adds entertainment, but it lacks impact. It gets the material across, but does little of any note with it.

With every scene, Lloyd lays out the image, the music, and the movement concept, but rarely allows these elements to develop or to acquire nuance. It is relentless.

What you get is spectacle, but very little variety – the tender moments lost. After we’ve watched a director loading the dice, it’s not really much fun watching him roll them.

Lloyd will next direct Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on Broadway, reuniting Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter after Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Certainly, this is what populism looks like.

Evita runs at the London Palladium until 6 September 2025

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The Tempest: Taxi For Sigourney Weaver

Ugh. Jamie Lloyd’s meandering production of The Tempest is a soulless disaster.

Too terrible to be boring; it is indistinguishable from Lloyd’s ‘edgy’ surrealism. But here you can get fixated staring at a wide-eyed Sigourney Weaver, 75, sat on a stool in bombed-out monochrome and wondering exactly what Jamie Lloyd thinks he’s doing. It’s deadly. 

Weaver – making her West End debut – is not up to it, as I suspect some of the production team knew when they gave her the part.

One major producer I spoke to said that “it stank from the very beginning,” but is it really that bad?

Still, I’m not saying that The Tempest is the worst production I’ve ever seen, although I’d quite like to provoke Lloyd’s lawyer into writing a cease-and-desist letter listing much worse shows from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Naturally, I am not being entirely serious. But over the past week or so, the topic of movie stars in the West End has resurfaced—it’s been more than two decades since Michael Billington complained about “the transformation of the West End into a playground for resting movie stars.”

Anyhow. Prices for Lloyd’s insufferable show, at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, have been slashed after a string of terrible reviews, which in part focus on Weaver’s performance as Prospero. (Furthermore, this is not a feminist first – Vanessa Redgrave took the role at the Globe more than 20 years ago.)

It is worth noting that the upper circle and balcony seats have also now been taken off sale from Monday to Thursday: around 900 seats per performance. That has got to be hitting the bottom line: on Broadway it would shutter within a fortnight.

Ultimately, it is not just about Weaver. Critic Dominic Maxwell recently summed star casting up well: “For theatre producers, adding a film or TV star to your cast is often the stroke of genius that creates a virtuous circle: big name, massive publicity, whopping ticket prices, speedy sell-out, stupendous success… On a film set, you can rest in your trailer between takes. In the West End, if you get reviews like Weaver’s, you have to keep turning up for work for weeks or months to come.”

Over to critic Kate Maltby, who issued a pointed analysis of the failure of The Tempest: “It doesn’t help that Lloyd’s shtick is wearing thin,” Maltby states. “The director has a limited set of tricks: hire a celeb, dress them in black or grey sportswear, amp up the pop or rock music, dim the lights, and play with microphones.”

Interestingly, Maltby then ponders how much credibility the West End is prepared to jettison to keep star-led productions running.

Alas, for producers and theatre owners, that’s the million-dollar question—probably less if you are prepared to take a calculated risk – star casting provides an extra pull for potential audiences weighing up carefully how they spend their cash.

To understand this, we need to remember that the commercial West End has always relied on big stars, and theatre survives because of them: commercial producers want to fill as many seats as possible.

However, if you parachute an unsuitable Hollywood star into a Shakespearean production and the star isn’t up to it and the concept is hollow, you will come unstuck.

This is important beyond the immediate consequences because the cost of making theatre has spiralled with escalating costs currently being experienced by all sectors of the economy. Indeed, Sir Cameron Mackintosh has reported profits of £43.2m for the year to the end of March 2024, down on the £45.4m he made in the previous 12 months.

The reason this matters is that the average top-price ticket in theatres across the UK has risen by 15% compared to last year.

It can, of course, cost up to £350,000 a week to operate a West End musical, which means that the production might need to sell £500,000 of tickets that same week to meet its operating costs.

This has a knock on with who can afford to see live theatre. Last year, agent Mel Kenyon told The Stage that “mirroring the American [pricing] model… is not a healthy model because it means you aren’t growing things from the bottom,” adding that the talent development “ecosystem is broken.”

But with so many hares now running on The Tempest’s shortcomings and the wider industry’s reliance on TV and film stars, it would be nice to think we might be closer to better approaches in the interests of the customer. Record numbers of audiences would buy tickets to that.

All of this connects back to a recent Economist article on the business models of Broadway and West End theatre. “The higher costs mean Broadway will continue to become a less attractive place to take the sorts of risks that are a prerequisite for brilliant, groundbreaking theatre. Shows by the likes of Lord Lloyd Webber will always find a home there, as will those fronted by stars whose names can pull in punters. But if you want to catch the next Stephen Sondheim, it is increasingly likely that you will need to turn your back on Times Square.”

This summer, Jamie Lloyd brings his Evita to The London Palladium – he is reportedly working on Lloyd Webber’s next musical ‘The Illusionist’. Between now and then, I suspect that partnership will come to an end.

The Tempest runs Until 1 February

And then, there’s also the fact that some Shakespeare poetry just has to be savoured:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

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Sunset Blvd

“GREAT stars have great pride…”

For all its bravado, Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard, book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, is a bitter and queasy production, and the figure of Desmond is its greatest grotesque, a former Pussycat Doll of 47 striving to be 25, surrounded by video images of herself and entranced by her own face on a screen.

First thing is first, Scherzinger cannot act – it does not matter, though: her vocals are world class. 

This is musical theatre as gothic assault and battery, and like the recent sexy Oklahoma! grabs you by the balls from the first moment and never slackens.

Lloyd’s stylish revival opens with Joe Gillis, the narrator (Tom Francis), unzipping himself from a body bag. “I believe in self-denial,” sings Francis in Let’s Have Lunch, the line both a humorous take on his financial status and an acknowledgement of his sense of frustration. 

Desmond appears in just a black slip for most of the show and Soutra Gilmore’s design is dark. 

Crucially, video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom deserve credit for the cinematography, initially distracting, it pays off in that it gives a nod to old Hollywood and the Insta-era. There are big screens and live relay cameras, while both the backstage at the Savoy and in the street. Watchers and watched.

The screen wins, every time.

Meanwhile, at 10086 Sunset Boulevard, in Desmond’s mad mansion, there is always champagne to hand, and enough money to cater to her every whim and to turn Gillis into a kept man. 

“Without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount studios,” she declares, discounting film crew on the lot: in Scherzinger’s hands she becomes a victim of her own mania.

The lyrics – bittersweet, sharp and accompanied by a fabulous orchestra – are left to speak for themselves.

David Thaxton as Max Von Mayerling (he is the only one writing her fan letters) is brilliant as Desmond’s fiercely protective servant and former husband. 

Though the musical may be 30 years old, Lloyd’s stripped-down, psychologically focused production forces us to contemplate the cost of needing to be adored – namely, the unquenchable thirst for validation that cultivates beneath a culture of self obsession.

The opening of Act 2 is pulled off to stunning effect. 

Fabian Aloise supplies incisive choreography for the lively ensemble. I really liked the tongue in cheek staging of This Time Next Year. But for traditionalists – which I would mostly class myself – it’s a curiously disengaging experience. (Just don’t expect any of them to smile at the curtain call).

Elsewhere, there is subtlety from Grace Hodgett Young as Betty. The triumph is in showing that the jauntiness is not separate from darker aspects but dependent on them.

There will be those who can’t stand it, I am normally wary of parachuting pop stars and reality stars into musicals, but this version is an almost total triumph. It works.

Every now and then there is too much mugging and self-consciousness, of working too hard on pressing a point, but the detail is unrelenting. Here, Jamie Lloyd demonstrates that he has a sense of humour, which is a relief. 

Norma Desmond still causes excitement when she enters the soundstage. After all, she is big – it’s the pictures that got small. This is a revival with razor sharp clarity and passion.

Sunset Boulevard runs at Savoy theatre, London, until 6 January 2024


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