Seeing “Evita” at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival? Bring a vomit bag.

Do Cry for Me, an Evita-Audience-Member.

July 23, 2010

I just saw “Evita” at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

A drum machine and a drunk with a tin whistle could have composed that clattery, incompetent music. Utter tat!

By Euterpe (Greek goddess of music) what a loud, grating, truly lousy show.

Enough to make Richard Rogers circumvolve in his sepulcher!

“Evita” comprises the usual Andrew Lloyd Webber musical stillbirth: one good song delivered, namely “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” followed by two long hours of strident, unmelodious afterbirth, with the remainder of the Evitan cacophony made up of a bad pastiche of Latin American rhumbas and tangos. All I can do is to quote the Latin New Testament: Noli me Tangere! A rattling-speaker sound system and desperately over-miked actors did not help.

Each summer, in its customary accommodating manner, Stratford’s Avon Theater finds a new way to make audiences uncomfortable. For years the Avon delighted in narrow seats designed in the 1940s for 46-pound tubercular anorexics. This summer the project is entitled: “We Can Effectively Deafen 30,000 Theatergoers.” The second-hand Altec speakers employed inside the Avon were last used for an open air concert a few years ago in Greece. It was a lute recital by Orpheus.

Remember the talentless pandemonium of Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard”? One good song “With One Look” and two hours of “fill” music. Same thing with “Evita.” Theatrical spectacle, touted as Europe’s “contribution” to the modern Broadway musical, crams the Avon stage with all manner of metallic moving scenery. At the Avon, for this “Evita,” a Brutalist iron gridwork of Latin American balconies, up stage, dominates the entire production. Here’s a musical that opens with a large casket pushed into audience faces! Giant sliding screens of steel mesh enclose the setting. Ominously the satanic mesh gates open and close throughout the musical to frame the repression of Peron’s dictatorship and symbolize the narrowness of Evita’s mind and possibly of her twat. Ewwww, what a deep thought!

As intelligent critics have pointed out over the long, long years of Webber’s failure-stained career, the hyped-up theatrical machinery that overpowers his musicals is there for one purpose: to cover up the absence of listenable music in his musicals. Andrew Lloyd Webber does not write well in any sustained manner through one individual musical. Thus, say all the directors who sit in rehearsal listening to his fumblings and tawdry musical parodies of better composers, we better snow the audience rubes with moving scrims and stage trickery. Remember "Phantom of the Opera" when, sitting in a front row, you thought you might spend the hours immediately after the performance having fragments of a chandelier surgically removed from your date's breasts?

In the 2010 program handed out at this year’s Avon production in Stratford, there is some self-serving propaganda by one of the “musicology experts” who occasionally bore us to death on CBC Radio, namely one Robert Harris. Robert proceeds to tell us that the lack of song and character in Lloyd Webber’s work is purposive. Riiight!

I can only permit myself to quote Harris’ silliest sentence: “The modern musical (like the modern sensibility, one is tempted to say) is one of powerful showiness, presented to the hardened gaze of cold reflection – which is absorbed by the spectacular but simultaneously suspicious of it.” Horseshit, Harris! Utter poppycock. The vilest pro-Stratford spin on bad art. There is not one line smart enough to be “suspicious” of spectacle in “Evita.” It is a deeply stupid libretto with stupid lyrics and under them pokey, hiccupy, chattery music that is, chiefly, a farrago of ill-written recitativo. As for his music flowing melodically in any fashion, Webber has never even heard of legato. However, little Andrew did attend class the day they demonstrated staccato.

Let me return to recitativo briefly. Such a recitative is a manner of musical declaiming in between singing and spoken words, used in the dialogue and narrative parts of an opera or oratorio. So it’s another ploy Webber filches from grand opera. Let us imagine a singer in an opera whose stage character has the most mundane of information to convey to the audience. Instead of speaking a line such as, “I’ll go upstairs to see if father is feeling better,” the character sort of sing-speaks a line like “I shall ascend the bruised marble of the solemn steps whereunto and whither lies the chamber of my paternal entity.” In others words, the libretto writer’s gaspingly bad stage dialogue is obscured, scummed over, by glutinous, stringy musical lines of no discernable melody.

Now, recitativo can work in the hands of a lyricist capable of clever stage words and a composer adept at long lines of fetching underscoring. Think of Lerner’s speak-a-song items for Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady” or for Richard Burton in “Camelot.” With talent, anything is possible.

If you don’t believe my judgments about this junk , obtain an original cast recording of “Evita” and just audit the hours of clunkish crap that Rice and Webber pitchfork at us, as if we were unfed cattle who had never heard “Showboat,” “The Merry Widow” or anything by Puccini.

By the way, the reason I called Robert Harris’ shameless defense of “Evita” self-serving is because Robert Harris works for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Harris, twinkling pixieishly, appears at Stratford’s little afternoon tea parties for wheelchaired grannies dispensing his boiled-sweet bons mots in a breathless macaroon-and-molasses voice that has become anathema to any CBC Radio listener with even a modicum of musicological knowledge. Here in this program praising “Evita,” Robert Harris is a low hack, shilling for his supper.

In writing “Evita,” Webber and Rice decided they would revolutionize the bedraggled Broadway musical comedy. The two Brit geniuses would insert solid characterization and nasty protagonists into the flimsy, sentimental, light-headed American musical tradition. This dipstick duo would bring back to the musical what it left behind in the 1870s – galumphing, clumping, lead-footed stage spectacle and ten-ton sets that would have made P. T. Barnum proud when he introduced Jumbo the Elephant and Elasto, The Rubber Boy of Borneo.

Wow, we’d see a poor Argentinian woman, Eva Duarte, generally perceived to be an ambitious slut, presented on stage in all her pushiness and watch her vamp a fudge-brained Fascist moron, an army officer who through sheer luck became president of Argentina. Eva Duarte could act and she put on a lifelong performance as a “friend of the people of the Argentine.”

So there is material in her life’s tale with which to confect a powerful musical story. But this Webber-Rice offering is not it. Placed beside any of the great composers of the last 100 years on Broadway or in The West End, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work reflects what used to be called “the pathetic fallacy,” his physical status as a homunculus apes perfectly the dwarfed nature of his musical accomplishment. He’s a low-talent imitator of other, greater composers. The one or two songs that are pleasant from each of his musicals are unoriginal, treacle-soaked kitsch with their melodic content owing a heavy debt to bad 19^th-century opera dreck, like Meyerbeer and other kings of copycat shlock. Yes, he got lucky a few times. “Cats” comes to mind. But consider the lugubrious sludge of failed song in his ten to twenty junk musicals: “Love Never Dies “(2010) [Casselman insert: Oh yes it does J], “By Jeeves” (1996), “Bombay Dreams” (2002), “The Woman in White” (2004), “The Beautiful Game” (2000), “Aspects of Love” (1989). Vast cabinets full of his sheet music will supply shit-sheets for the bottoms of bird cages for decades to come, no, for centuries. Name one solid singable song from any of those turkeys.

Timothy Miles Bindon Rice, the Webber-footed lyricist here, has never written a single line of fresh, lively, inventive English lyrics in all his long life. Tim Rice has NO idea of how to be witty or to advance character by means of the playful poetic use of English, as did Lerner, Hammerstein, Porter, Berlin, as does the brilliant Sondheim. As the “Evita” lyricist, Rice is a peon. The lyrics to “Evita” are pedestrian and astoundingly banal. No word play, no delight in language, just stoned typing. For Robert Harris to claim that their work represents anything in the modern musical except the abyss is simply laughable.

I promised I would try to spare any more Robert Harris lines, but I must include one more to demonstrate what a moral vacuum encloses this man’s stated-in-print politics. Writes Harris, “It’s hard for those of us bombarded by the fractured kaleidoscopes of our over-changing present to know exactly what to make of Juan Peron and his second wife, Eva . . .” What!? Just how high in the isolating ivory tower of CBC Radio executivedom did you dwell, Mr. Harris? Peron was a Fascist brain-stem and Eva was his whore. There is NO dispute about that among persons acquainted with Latin American history.

The Stratford cast puts forth a yeoman effort. Chilina Kennedy as Evita tries her best to overcome bad noisy songwriting and a musical play that does not give a fig about fine-tuning human character and presenting its foibles in an entertaining mode.

Others may clasp Andrew Lloyd Webber to their song-moistened bosoms. They weep, you see, upon hearing his songs and the tears bedew their embonpoints. But I have not changed my mind about the Weblet’s minimal talent.

Save your 110 dollars this summer. Don’t go to "Evita."

Buy a good history of Argentina and read about what this evil, detestable couple inflicted on their country. It is nothing to sing about.

— Bill Casselman, audience victim of “Evita”