Review: Evita

VUOKKO HOVATTA SHINES AS EVITA

Helsinki City Theatre’s musical about Eva Peron’s Cinderella story goes like a Latin dance.

Finland Festivals’ Young Artist of the Year 2002 and actress Vuokko Hovatta , who was part of the original line-up of the band Ultra Bra, returns to stardom in the title role of the musical Evita. Hovatta, who is now a permanent member of the Helsinki City Theatre’s staff, is a brilliant performer and a wonderful singer who can easily cope with the rhythmic and tonal intricacies of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music.

Conflicting views have been presented about the person of Maria Eva Duarte de Perón (Evita), the wife of Argentine President Juan Perón, who is adored by the people, depending on the perspective from which the motives for this action are examined. In Evita at the Helsinki City Theatre, directed by Kurt Nuotio, a saint legend born among poor people is given mercy in a civilised way, but revenge is highlighted as a central everyday motive: it targets the bourgeoisie, who rejected the hired maid’s bastard in childhood and did not give him any value.

With all the wealth she had amassed and outward ostentation, Eva Perón showed her ridiculers that she had risen above them, and the people did not mind the benefactor who generously distributed aid to the poor.

Eva Perón had well internalized the social doctrine bearing her husband’s name, which aimed at state capitalism free from foreign ownership. She also personified the struggle for women’s social status, for which the women’s right to vote in Argentina in 1947 is recorded on the list of merits, among other things.

But of course, the musical is just entertainment, not a report from the truth commission. Evita skillfully uses feminine weapons to carry out her plan to rise to stardom and influence.

The first target is a famous tango singer who abuses a 15-year-old girl from a small town and is forced to take her with him to Buenos Aires under moral pressure.

There, Eva gradually gains a foothold as an actress and model, and later as a popular radio presenter, and she does not shy away from using her career to promote suitable lovers.

Eva meets Juan Peron, the Argentine Minister of Labour, at the age of 25. Interpreting the meeting as love at first glance is only a partial truth: there is a mutual benefit at work. For Juan Perón, Evita is a politically credible connection to the common people, and for them, in turn, the door opens from the man’s bedroom to the halls of power.

In some way, Nuotio’s guidance has tried to avoid highlighting the perhaps genuine contradiction that characterised her short life in the politically incorrect Evita. Evita is first and foremost interpreted as a skilled gambler, and even though it is a Cinderella story, it is seen in the light of self-gain.

In the musical Evita, the critical commentator is the legendary freedom fighter, Argentine-born Ernesto Che Guevara, who joined the anti-Peronist front in his youth. Screenwriter Tim Rice’s inclusion of Che is in itself a clever move: in the long run, neither the ideology he represents nor Peronism, which combined the ideas of capitalism and communism, fared in the long run.

However, musicals are not made because of their weight in terms of content. Evita is above all a well-executed stage show. It offers fast-paced Latin rhythms from all sides and natural melodies that Webber did not underestimate in his initial production.

Webber’s musicals are composed through, and in the City Theatre’s performance, this has been realised through the fact that it has also been “danced through”. There is no limit to where the director’s work ends and where the choreographer, Markku Nenonen’s, part, begins. The choreography encompasses all the theatrical action, for which there is plenty of room in Kari Junnikkala’s sets. A lot is done with lights: they are often directed from above, which means that the floor can also be used as an element to perceive the space.

The musical Evita, which premiered in London in 1978, has previously been made in Finland at the Kemi City Theatre (1986) and the Tampere Theatre (1994). All in all, it is such a great work that no strange justifications are needed for its reappearance.