Review: Evita
EVITA CAN BE HEARD IN VUOKKO HOVATA’S VOICE
A beautiful woman with a sufficiently vague past and ambitious in her current social position.
No, the Helsinki City Theatre’s spring musical is not about Finland’s Minister of Culture Tanja Vienonen de Karpela, but about the wife of the former president of Argentina, María Eva Duarte de Perón, nicknamed Evita.
THE COURSE OF LIFE’S LIFE beats the plot of soap operas, even South American telenovelas.
Born in 1919, María Eva was an illegitimate child and the only one of the five siblings never recognized by her father. When he is in confirmation school, he leaves the village for the large and beautiful Buenos Aires – how and with what help he ends up there depends on the narrator.
If you ask his family: innocently, under the protection of his mother and with the help of his own reciters, if you trust the story of the upper class: along the thigh and not just by blinking your beautiful eyes.
CONTRADICTION is the common thread in Evita’s life: her life went from poor and despised conditions to the sweetest possible. As Madam President, she founded a foundation and distributed aid to the poor, but she herself wore Dior jacket suits and was involved in creating, or at least strongly beside accepting, a dictatorial system in which freedom of speech was not granted, at least not to opponents.
The truth about Evita’s life will certainly never be fully revealed, as she has far too many opponents. Moreover, some are always more equal than others in historiography. The cards of an uneducated, young, strong-willed and beautiful woman are not the best in this game.
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What is certain, however, is that Evita died of uterine cancer at the age of only 33, which is also part of her tragic life.
Many think that Evita died as a saint, others think that she was a self-interest seeker who bankrupted the state. In addition to the national mourning declared for a month, the news was interrupted every night at 8:25 p.m. until 1955 and the overthrow of Juan Perón – Santa Evita had died in 1952 at that rung of the clock.
HELSINKI City Theatre’s Evita is just as much of a musical as expected. Handsome, credible in his portrayal of the times, skillful, impressive, big, fluent and almost wasteful in his ideas and implementation.
It doesn’t cling to the soul, but it moves swiftly and builds the role of Evita so nicely that the viewer can’t get away with it. You have to be a rather cynical rat if the story and the familiar songs don’t awaken at least a little inner outpouring in the viewer – even when sung from Evita’s deathbed.
Everything is built around Evita and happens because of Evita. During the musical, the little brown-haired girl grows into an international icon Evita, who dares to say that Argentina is synonymous with herself. This is exactly what happens to Vuokko Hovata as Evita. She is the star of the musical, glowing, beautiful and skilled.
Hovatta in Evita’s body is determined and haughty, as a young person in her all-powerful beauty can be, but with her voice she captures Evita’s contradictions and the different shades of being human. She sings and acts out Evita’s fears and weaknesses with her voice, but also her defiance and determination. Hovatta’s voice is both fragile and powerful, and it never relies solely on technique, but feels and interprets. It would be interesting to hear whether Maria Ylipää, who is less than 10 years younger, the second interpreter of the role of Evita, is capable of the same vocal and interpretive maturity.
Sami Hintsanen is inevitably overshadowed by Evita, as he should be as Juan Perón, but Emilia Nyman , who sang in the small role of Perón’s mistress, drove the premiere audience crazy.
I wonder what the cultural editor of a provincial newspaper has to say about the great Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice’s doings, but if you were to tweak the role of Che, the narrator of the musical.
Of course, the narrator makes sure that the viewer somehow keeps up with the musical, which moves at a rather brisk pace, but as a kind of general social conscience, the narrator is quite superimposed and unnecessarily pointing.
When the narrator is still dressed like left-wing freedom fighters with Cuban stars in green berets, it becomes quite clear that the viewer still cannot be left free to choose what to think of Evita.