“Evita” at London Palladium
Mark Shenton in the West End
3 July 2025
In putting the Lloyd into Andrew Lloyd Webber, auteur theatre director Jamie Lloyd has somewhat violently but altogether thrillingly recalibrated the work of the West End (and arguably the world’s) most successful living composer.
Rachel Zegler as Eva Perón.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
In Lloyd’s 2023 West End revival of the 1993 musical Sunset Boulevard, the playboy gigolo Joe Gillis went walk-about down the Strand (and subsequently on Broadway through Shubert Alley) as he sang the title song, trailed by a hand-held camera operator who live-cast the results to the audience seated inside the Savoy Theatre. Lloyd repeats the identical trick for his new imagining of an even more iconic moment in another ALW classic Evita, but this time pulls off something even more spectacular. Instead of merely chancing on a few surprised passers-by, the advance publicity around this moment is now conjuring an audience in the hundreds.
“As a mere observer of this tasteless phenomenon, one has to admire the stage management” sings Che, the narrator-like figure who keeps the action on track and provides a constant jaundiced commentary on it. Then Rachel Zegler’s simultaneously tiny but immense Eva Perón takes to the balcony outside the London Palladium to address the show’s most famous hit “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” to the vast free audience who have gathered below, while the paying audience inside the theatre watch it on a giant screen. Che is right: it is a triumph of stage management (here led by David Kane) and richly amplifies the public and private moments that the song is there to serve, by delivering the biggest cast of extras the West End has likely ever conjured.
It’s one way to cut down on the cost of extras, but it also democratizes the act of participating in a pricey West End theatre show as never before. No wonder it has instantly become the most talked-about moment of the theatrical summer, if not year. And you won’t even have to buy a ticket to be a living, breathing, and essential part of its roughly seven exhilarating minutes. Nonetheless it is mostly being staged for the audience inside the theatre, not outside it, with Eva specifically directed to sneakily acknowledge our presence rather than the mob in Argyll Street.
It also, and most importantly, isn’t a mere gimmick but actually a direct comment on the moment, when Eva Perón seeks a final validation, as she approaches death, at the age of just 33, of her adoring audience. She also, for the first and only time in the evening, dresses for the part, in a gorgeous white gown (“you need to adore me / so Christine Dior me”, she sings earlier in Tim Rice’s perennially smart lyrics, though they’re not always fully audible here as Adam Fisher’s sound is frequently amped up to the deafening max, which pays diminishing returns for anyone trying to actually follow the story. (But the intention may be to feel it rather than follow it, in which case it is a resounding bass-filled triumph.)
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
We see her backstage on camera, too, after the number removing her blonde wig and costume; the rest of the time she’s in a mere back slip and bra outfit, her midriff and olive skin exposed.
Soutra Gilmour’s costumes for the entire company are more about what flesh they reveal than they conceal; this is a very fleshy, muscular show, in every sense, of explicit, even calculated, voyeurism. The male dancers could come direct from the current West End production Magic Mike.
Lloyd’s sensationally slick, relentlessly frenetic, stressing-the-sinister production isn’t shy of the theatrical gimmicks he has lately developed and expanded – with a generous borrowing from Ivo van Hove and Robert Lepage on the interactions with video technology front, and explosions of confetti that leave the stalls covered in the stuff (as in Lloyd’s recent Much Ado About Nothing at Drury Lane). A lot of the show feels recycled, including the sight of Che (played by the muscular, vocally impressive Diego Andres Rodriguez, a theatrical newcomer whose only second credit this is, after debuting in the Broadway Sunset Boulevard) ending the show in his briefs only, being symbolically paint-balled, just as a similarly undressed Joe Gillis ended Sunset Boulevard drenched in blood and little else.
Rachel Zegler makes a commanding West End debut in the title role, at the age of just 24, following her Broadway debut last year as Juliet opposite Kit Connor’s Romeo in Shakespeare’s play. The production is so full of meta commentary, though, that it sometimes makes it hard to work out what is genuine characterization and what is merely striving for effect. It’s nevertheless still a firebrand performance that you can’t take your eyes off.
She is tenderly supported by James Olivas’s younger (and sexier) than usual Perón, the Argentinian dictator she bends to her will.
Also eye-catching are Bella Brown, with her aching rendition of “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” as one of Perón’s discarded mistresses, and Aaron Lee Lambert, as Eva’s equally spurned former lover’s Magaldi.
The agile, aggressive choreography of Fabian Aloise keeps the stage in a flurry of movement so busy it is impossible to differentiate details, let alone bodies, but the sheer electricity and combustibility is undeniable.
It may, with Soutra Gilmour’s stage of seven receding bleachers dominated by light boxes that spell out “Evita”, look more like the setting for a staged concert than a fully realized musical, but it delivers an experience that’s like no other production of Evita I’ve ever seen. Michael Grandage’s 2006 West End revival (on which Lloyd was his assistant) may have had a lot more dramatic integrity and honoured its storytelling more impressively, but as a shot of sheer theatrical adrenaline, this Evita is a rainbow-coloured high in every sense.
