EVITA
Now, after a decade of scrutinizing people like Nancy Reagan and Imelda Marcos, we may find Eva Peron a good deal less foreign; rather than an extraordinary, aberrant figure we can brush off as the product of a society very different from ours, we can recognize her as the embodiment of a pattern neither foreign nor uncommon: an ambitious and amoral woman rises to real power by using her sex appeal and understanding of imagery and symbolism to help propel her man into her nation’s presidency. Indeed, if Rice and Lloyd Webber had happened to write Evita a decade later than they did, they couldn’t have helped but be accused of using Juan and Eva Peron as thinly disguised stand-ins for Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Scenes like the one in which Juan daydreams of taking a long vacation while Evita browbeats him into seeking more power, or in which Evita sleeps her way up through society as she graduates from small-time show-biz stardom to big-time political power, seem to come straight from the files of Donald Regan and Kitty Kelley. The time for Evita is more right than ever.
