Never let it be said that I’m not a fan of experimentation. I was once in a play with a fellow local journalist and we had to write our characters’ fictional bios; she wrote that hers was famous for “her acclaimed one-woman production of 12 Angry Men.” I still crack up at that joke because it’s the perfect encapsulation of how the line between “bold reimagining” and “pretentious self-importance” is razor-thin. If centuries of doing Shakespeare in non-Elizabethan settings has taught us anything, it’s that anything deemed “classic” can handle a literal change of scenery.
SF Playhouse co-founder/artistic director Bill English does a curious bit of experimentation with his company’s season-finale production of Evita (through September 7 at the SF Playhouse): He tries to make the beloved musical a black box show. If Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals are known for anything—besides oversimplification and accusations of plagiarism—it’s for a level of grandeur matching the composer’s infamously large ego. There’s a reason Phantom is known for that chandelier. English, by contrast, directs his cast on a shockingly bare Playhouse stage that only occasionally gets rolled-on set pieces (a freestanding door here, a dais there, a bed that doubles as a platform) designed by Heather Kenyon.
One imagines he was, as a director, attempting what Webber and lyricist Tim Rice do through the character Ché (in a fantastic turn by Alex Rodriguez): attempt to strip away the legend of the late Argentinian first lady in the hopes of finding the person within it. As with the original production, the results are mixed.
Indeed, Evita remains controversial as an oddly-non-judgmental look at a divisive political figure. Eva Duarte-Perón (Sophia Alawi) was, after all, wife to right-wing military president Juan Perón (Peter Gregus), and acted as his glamorous spokesperson before she died of cervical cancer at the age of 33. Perhaps longtime British Conservatives Rice and Webber didn’t see a problem with Eva declaring herself a pro-union feminist while championing right-wing policies, but that’d be a cop-out when covering someone for who tried to run for VP before her death.
Even their everyman avatar Ché—the duo conceived the character as anonymous, but some productions allude to him being Guevara; this production is ambiguous—is less concerned with the Peróns unfulfilled promises to the descamisados (think “Argentinian proletariat”) than her Mary Antoinette proclivities. Add to that the fact for all Rice and Webber’s pretenses of demythologizing Eva, they hang onto several infamously unproven and misogynist urban legends, such as being the teenage mistress to married musician Agustín Magaldi (Jurä Davis, whose voice inspired the first spontaneous applause of the night) as the first-of-many screw-her-way-to-the-top trysts.
Still, it’s interesting watching English try to strip down a story of an haute couture populist so beloved by the public that she essentially did on political stages what Taylor Swift does on concert stages—with the same sort of venomous fanbase ready to defend their blonde idol. It works well in the first scene when Ché reveals Eva among her own mourners and then has her act out her life story. Watching Eva and Juan take a stroll across the Playhouse’s rotating stage floor adds the right level of dreamlike magical realism to a story being told through conjecture. Yet, the scenes never really convey the aforementioned grandeur of Eva holding sway over hundreds of thousands.
To be fair, theatre directors have struggled with this very problem for a few thousand years now. But part of Evita’s appeal has always been that showmanship—it’s the entire point of the song “Rainbow High”—and this production never gives us a larger-than-life Eva to contrast with its attempts at intimacy. (The one exception is the choreography by Playhouse regular Nicole Helfer, whose group routines easily make a dozen people seem like a hundred, and inject much-needed energy into the show.)
Then there’s Eva herself: Sophia Alawi is a fine performer, including on the Playhouse stage, but she doesn’t have the vocal range Webber requires for the lead role. She’s fine when the songs have her in her correct register, but when “Beware of the City” requires her to shout “Screw the middle-class!,” Alawi struggled to hit the high note. She fared better than the also-struggling Gregus, but the two leads shouldn’t be struggling at all.
One is tempted to think they were cast more for ethnicity than singing ability, but that just highlights the problem of this production’s “race-bent” casting. I don’t know if either Alawi or Gregus is Latine, but the majority of the cast seems to have been chosen as if ethnicity didn’t matter. For a story with all-Latine characters, the Playhouse could have done better—especially in the Bay Area, with its countless Latine actor-singers, both AEA and non.
That’s what makes Rodriguez’s performance as Ché such a wonderful stand-out. The show’s low-wattage energy levels clearly wore on the audience with whom I saw the show, but Rodriguez’s electric presence and always-spot-on vocals made him the perfect one-man Greek chorus for the multi-decade-spanning story. He commands the stage every moment he’s on, which Ché shouldn’t be able to do when standing next to Eva. That’s also true of Chanel Tilghman (who owns her sad scene as Perón’s dismissed mistress) and the chorus. The Playhouse production of Evita oddly has us fixated on everyone except its eponymous lead.
I saw the show during its first COVID-safe performance opening weekend. (Playhouse COVID-safe shows are only the first Friday of each calendar month.) Upon arriving, the person in the glassed-off ticket booth was unmasked, and the usher welcoming me into the lobby seemed almost apologetic in assuring me that I “only have to mask in the theatre,” not the lobby. The crowd were pretty good about keeping their masks on, though a few entered without them. The real star of the night (other than Alex Rodriguez) was the Playhouse HVAC system. Even though it was a warm day in SF (and the entire West Coast), I was glad the AC wasn’t the Playhouse-typical Artic-cold. Even in a full house, my Aranet4’s CO² readings never got above the mid-500s, with a closing high of 539ppm. Not bad.
Given the continued popularity of Evita, it’s easy to see why the Playhouse wanted to end their season with a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Attempting to stage it with just-shy-of-Our–Town simplicity was a bold choice. Unfortunately, the pieces don’t all fit. Evita was supposed to end the Playhouse season with fireworks; what we got was a sparkler.
EVITA runs through September 7 at the SF Playhouse. Tickets and further info here.
