Long Live ‘Evita’? She Has

You can pour a little salsa on the cardboard, but it’s still cardboard.

“Evita,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice pop opera, or schlock opera, or “schlopera,” is back on the road for a 20th anniversary national tour. Through Sunday it continues at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. It travels north to Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre for a May 12-30 engagement.

Larry Fuller, choreographer for the original London and Broadway stagings by director Harold Prince, here serves as director-choreographer. Mostly we get the Prince staging again, though Fuller and company have augmented the material with some Latino elements.

Among them: The (overdue) Latino casting of the three major roles, plus the Eva Peron understudy. A heightened presence, choreographically and musically, for the tango, notably underplayed in the original. And, with an aural vengeance, the correct, Spanish pronunciation of words such as “Argentina.” As in, don’t cry for me.

No tears need be wasted on this show, certainly. The current tour’s solid and impressive. More money and, probably, more care was spent on it than on the last couple of “Evita” tours. Even if two of the three leading roles aren’t memorably sung--only Raul Esparza’s Che connects throughout--everyone has their moments. And the staging, as ever, certainly has some style.

For some of us that’s about it. Ten seconds into the “Evita” score, when that lame, ultra-’70s electric guitar lick attempts to deliver something raw! modern! now! in the opening “Requiem for Evita,” well . . . you know what you’re in for.

With or without Rice, Lloyd Webber can’t get away from his beloved, battered, glamorous martyrs. He’s musicalized Jesus (“Jesus Christ Superstar”); the wife of a dictator (“Evita”); a kitty tramp (“Cats”); a Billy Wilder gorgon (“Sunset Boulevard”); and, most recently, a guy claiming to be Jesus (“Whistle Down the Wind”).

Whatever his idioms, whatever the mood or atmosphere the subject may demand, Lloyd Webber’s in there, slugging away, pumping up the emotion. He’s not a composer suggesting a light and whimsical spirit, which is why even “Cats” feels like work.

“Evita” is just a series of moving pictures designed, cannily, to accompany a concept album that tells you not much about Eva Peron, or Juan Peron, or Argentina, or politics or sex or anything, except a hollow sort of fabulousness. The woman liked to shop. The woman slept her way up. The woman died young, of cancer. Sinner and saint. What an enigma.

But there’s a difference between an enigma and a blank. “Evita” has so little to say on its subject, it’s more like an Evita doll set than a pop opera. She changes clothes; she tackles Buenos Aires; she marries a man of influence, Peron (here played by Raymond Jaramillo McLeod, dour and muffled). She changes clothes. She sticks her arms out in That Pose.

There’s nothing underneath the surfaces of the title role. Natalie Toro has fun with what’s on top--her grin and flash suggest an Argentine Joan Blondell--though her voice is an acquired taste, at least with these songs (it goes nasal in the upper register). And Toro succumbs to one truly unintentionally funny moment: When she collapses from the pain of her fatal illness late in Act 2, it’s as if she’s being flung to the floor by Lloyd Webber’s crashing chords.

In the Act 1 finale, wherein the Workers of Peron’s World hoist union signs and demand “A New Argentina,” we hear the cries for “Higher wages!” and “Jobs for women!” You could add “Better lyrics!” Struggling for a point of view, any point of any view, Rice loads up on the sneering cynicism for Che (“Oh what a circus! Oh what a show!”); callow self-centeredness for Eva (“I came from the people/They need to adore me/So Christian Dior me”); and for Juan Peron, well, nobody remembers anything he sings. And there’s no one else in “Evita,” hardly, besides the tango singer (Tom Flynn, quite funny) Evita sleeps with on the way up, and Peron’s unnamed mistress (Angela Covington), recipient of the score’s most affecting and unaffected number, “Another Suitcase in Another Hall.”

Can you argue with success, arguably the first of its megamusical ilk? Sure you can. Here’s what a shiny hack job like “Evita” means, when all’s said and done: It means employment for actors. And it means fodder for parody, as “Forbidden Broadway” has proven, ever since Patti LuPone did the show on Broadway 20 years ago.

* “Evita,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight and Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 1 and 6 p.m. Ends April 25. $21-$52.50. (714) 740-7878 or www.ticketmaster.com. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

****

Natalie Toro: Eva

Ana Maria Andricain: Eva (Thursday, weekend matinees)

Raul Esparza: Che

Raymond Jaramillo McLeod: Peron

Tom Flynn: Magaldi

Angela Covington: Mistress

Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Directed and choreographed by Larry Fuller. Sets, costumes, projections by Timothy O’Brien. Lighting by Richard Winkler. Sound by Abe Jacob. Musical director Kevin Farrell. Production stage manager Greg Hirsch.