Gold digger — and a nation’s saint

Evita: Lowry, Salford

“EVITA” returns after some years away from the North-West and like that other recent returnee, “Les Miserables”, has had a wash and brush-up.

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit had been little changed since it first hit the stage in the mid-Seventies, the product of hugely-talented director Harold Prince, and was getting distinctly old hat.

Unlike “Les Mis”, updated by Cameron Mackintosh with the latest technology, this “Evita” comes courtesy of producer and director Bill Kenwright and director Bob Tomson, both well-known for highly commercial, popular stage shows.

This “Evita” has no big stars, the choreography mimics, without quite achieving, the original’s political-dance themes; the set is grand but bare — a few pillars, staircases and balcony, and the costumes are the usual high-class, military and downtrodden masses that rarely stand out — except for the white ball gown of Evita’s “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”.

In Abigail Jaye the show fortunately has a very good Evita: Jaye can play young and determined as well as she plays the nation’s grande dame, pulling the performance together with powerful singing.

Opposite her, Mark Heenehan overcomes looking rather too avuncular and offers a determined Peron.

The same can’t quite be said for Mark Powell’s Che: the look is English trying to be rough, the sound is far too polite; and Abigail Matthews looks too young and sounds like a choirgirl as the mistress.

But the show achieves what it presumably sets out to do: redo Evita, the musical, in a way that retains the story and songs without worrying too much about Rice’s original intentions.

Energetic dancing, a coarsening of the emotional content and a cheapening of the original direction make this less Rice’s Argentinian Fascist Politics: the Musical and more Eva Peron: Gold-Digger and Saint.

Some might think making everything lighter and coarser helps. But I prefer a musical with a little more integrity than one that goes for an Argentinian wannabe as the nation’s saintly little mother.

All that really remains unscathed is Lloyd Webber’s score — which has numbers better than anything he has written since.