It is Eva’s show first and last, dead and alive, Eva and Evita. It’ll about Eva. Tina Arena nails the performance. Chapeaux!
The use of archival film was interesting and we wanted more of that, and that it be integrated into the story rather than merely wallpaper.
There is some clever choreography with the martinet toy soldiers.
But….
Yes, there are a number of them and they concern the narrative and the music. Me, I know nothing about music, so I will clear the air on that first. I found it to be repetitive. Even I could tell that. And it was shallow. The performers made the best of it, to be sure.
Moving on to the narrative.
It’s only a show. Why does it matter? Because, as with movies, many viewers will suppose it is accurate and after seeing it conclude they now know the Perón story. Aaaaargh!
Tomás Elroy Martínez called it an abomination and I can see why.
The narrative reflects the arrested development of a Hollywood script writer, whose idea of a sophisticated man of the world is Silvio Berlusconi. None of the depth and complexity of the principals and the circumstances are present.
The program notes comment that while driving the author heard ten minutes of a radio program about Eva and that set him onto the trail. Ten whole minutes of preparation! From a shallow medium itself. Yes, I know the notes go on about his subsequent research. Oh hum.
This is not the time and place to go into any of the details, though previous reviews on this blog about the Peròns are there to be seen.
In this rendering there is too little of the man himself, Juan Perón, and too much a man who was not there Ernesto Guevara. (Ernie was a teenager at time, by the way, and still living at home). The latter is a narrator of sorts, reeking of cynicism, wreathed in cigar smoke, and running with sprayed on water. Intrusive and pointless to this observer.
How can a story of Argentina have so little tango in it. While the dancers do as told, it is hardly tango. But its absence reminded me of Carlos Saura’s masterpiece ‘Tango’ (1998).
The telling is stocked with the usual tropes that preoccupy boys with arrested development, sex and money alternating with money and sex, leavened by sex and money.
As is to be expected in such tripe, there is also in the program notes (which are not paginated) a reference to Eva’s ‘Machiavellian management’ of her career. One stereotype is thus trotted out to explain another, and neither connects with reality. By the way, when a woman manages her career it is blackened as with that adjective ‘Machiavellian,’ but when a man does likewise it is the habit of a successful person to be emulated by others.
The screen cover over the stage depicted Perón rising on the corpses of hapless workers, guarded by intimidating soldiers, protecting plutocrats, and luxuriating in riches. It is quadruple play of error. And indicative of the intellectual and historical veracity of what followed.
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