Review: Evita

PROFESSIONAL MUSICAL WITH VISIONS

Of course, it is tempting to make a musical, or opera for that matter, based on a historical fate. The advantage is the tickling of the documentary background; This has, at least in part, happened. The disadvantage, in turn, is the difficulty of penetrating under the skin of the protagonists in question, bringing them to life from both a real and a fictional point of view.

This is especially true of the difficult hybrid genre of musicals and musicals with reality material often tend to feel wooden and superficial. This is also partly the case with one of the most successful of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s and Tim Rice’s Evita (1978), which, despite a serious attempt, never fully gets its subject seriously into life.

And yet it is a brilliant musical.

One of Rice’s strongest librettos, which fruitfully confronts the private with the public. And, of course, the 30-year-old Lloyd Webber’s freshly multifaceted music, which is not yet bothered by the predictability that has come to characterize so many of his later scores.


Imaginative lighting

The material is undeniably captivating – basically the same basic parameters as in Puccini’s Tosca: politics, sex and violence, even if the violence is toned down to a minimum and the sex is only hinted at – and offers an intellectually alert and dramatically alert director grateful opportunities to stage a socially engaged love story model indestructible.

Kurt Nuotio – who, along with Georg Malvius, seems to have been given something of a monopoly on the Helsinki “blockbuster musicals” – certainly possesses all of the above-mentioned qualities and in his Evita direction has carefully grasped the possibilities offered by the material without trying to squeeze more out of it than feels meaningful.

And he has received constructive help, to say the least, from his visually responsible colleagues, who with astonishingly scarce means have not only created the illusion of Buenos Aires in the 1940s, but also a captivating framing of a life destiny, where the vision of a fairer society goes hand in hand with personal vanity in a way that is as fascinating as it is paradoxical.

Full-fledged music-making

Rarely have you seen such a well-oiled stage machinery that smoothly, sometimes almost unnoticed, shifts from one environment, atmosphere, to another, and rarely has the lighting played such a decisive overall role in its imaginative evocation of the sets and vivid images that are so telling in all their simplicity.

Nuotio inculcates emotional credibility into the intimate scenes while also making the tensely choreographed mass scenes come alive and vibrate.

Here, the contribution of each individual dancer and choir singer is of crucial importance, and there are certainly no listless extras on the City Theatre stage this time.

Then a small role as the teenage mistress is exquisitely gripped by Emilia Nyman, as is the tango star Magaldi by Mikko Vihma, while Juan Perón (an almost eerily portrait-like Sami Hintsanen) and his beloved wife Eva Duarte (a mighty charismatic Vuokko Hovatta) feel, if not right on point, so close to the mark.

Hovatta’s light soprano is captivating, even if an ounce of mezzo colouring has occasionally been in order, while Hintsanen, in typical acting fashion, sings from her throat; In and of itself, pure, but one-dimensional. The same applies to Petja Lähde’s Che – it is certainly as logical as it is ingenious of Rice to use Che Guevara as an ironically distancing commentator and voice of conscience – who, however, with her physically palpable stage presence, manages to convince us of her relevance in this context.

Since Henrik Wikström has also drilled his renowned orchestra – where some strings would probably have been good – to an admirably complete music-making, the City Theatre’s Evita appears as professionally and certainly not visionlessly realised musical theatre entertainment, which touches at the same time as it evokes ever-present thoughts about power and the danger of being blinded by it.