Jamie Lloyd, the director who stripped Sunset Boulevard to its brutal emotional core and reimagined Cyrano as digital-age isolation, brings his signature aesthetic to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice‘s EVITA for a 12-week run at the London Palladium. Lloyd is not subtle with his theme of political theatre. EVITA is emblazoned in LED marquee letters, mounted atop bleacher-style risers that dominate almost the entire show, only letting up once, and we shall come back to that. From the outset, EVITA announces itself as something different: not the respectfully staged biopics or impassioned hagiographies that have hitherto defined Evita’s afterlives, but a deliberate rumination on the art of spectacle.
It begins with the announcement of her death. Eva Perón died at 8.25pm on 26 July 1952, but here we are told it is “twenty twenty-five.” We are participating not in Eva Perón‘s story, but in the simulated afterlife of Evita.
The bleacher-style risers that dominate Soutra Gilmour‘s design are deeply deliberate. The reference to Beyoncé‘s Homecoming is impossible to miss, but also impossible to mistake. Where Homecoming was an act of reclamation, this is erasure. Beyoncé’s Coachella performance was Black in its form, function, and framing: stepping, call-and-response, marching band pageantry fused together to honour a cultural archive long denied its stage. It was restoration. Lloyd gestures to that architecture but guts it of content. The bodies here serve only the image of Eva. If Beyoncé’s spectacle was about truth-telling, Lloyd’s is about myth-making. His production offers a Western-made fantasy that reifies Evita’s image while denying her unknowable truth, bending it to the needs of this country, in this moment, where fascism is on the rise and women leaders have not signalled a break from establishment politics.
The messy, too-human parts of Evita’s story find brilliant ways to create distance. A Black woman in a white helmet, cone bra, and fatigues pops and locks across the stage, braids swinging beneath a white balloon as she glides robotically. The balloon bursts: people have been shot. No blood, no grief, no pause. She is one of many avatars, all Black, by the way. When the Peróns meet and begin seducing one another into political partnership, the stage floods red. But they do not touch. Two Black dancers perform an unrestrained Argentine tango for them, contorting their brown bodies while the real couple stands apart. Risk, passion, and brutality are systematically outsourced to those deemed more expendable while the central figures remain untouchable: managed inclusion in its purest form.
Elaine Paige was unmoved by Another Suitcase in Another Hall: a moment I found unexpectedly tender. When I thought more on it, I realised why: this was one of the few emotionally resonant scenes in the entire production. One of the only moments where the image cracked and something resembling a soul peeked through.
Then comes Don’t Cry for Me Argentina: the song teased all evening. Before I attended, a colleague told me people were upset: they had paid for tickets only to have this iconic scene handed to the street outside. I called them haters, until I was there and felt the dismissal myself.
The marquee lights vanish. A cinematic screen appears, projecting extreme close-ups as she glides through the Palladium lobby where we had just sipped interval wine. I thought she was coming. But no. She steps onto the actual external balcony to sing to the street below, and we watch her from inside the theatre, on screens. The staging is stunning. And it is the most revealing moment of the night.
This is Lloyd showing his hand. The most iconic moment of the show, and one of the most recognisable political images of the last century, is a thing that was made. The balcony, the dress, the tears: none of it just was. It was produced, staged, performed. There is one moment of authentic rupture: early on, Zegler spits “Screw the middle classes! I will never accept them” with real venom, her controlled persona momentarily cracking to lay bare something that was undeniably true to Eva Duarte’s politics. But it is fleeting and not repeated.
At the centre of this machination is Rachel Zegler, not just fantastic, but fantastical. Her lyric soprano is precise and fluid, controlled yet expansive, effortless but always brimming with intent. What is most striking is her confidence: not bravado, but something deeper and more rooted. There is no artifice in it, and that is how she most embodies Evita: an inner conviction rooted, perhaps, in delusion, but unshakeable nonetheless. It simply commands attention. After that, it matters little what is said or done. That quality inspires cult-hood and is impossible to fake. The historical Eva was messy, contradictory, ill. Zeglar’s performance and Eva’s life illustrate the central contradiction of women in power. We like them when they are perfectly packaged, we want the rough edges smoothed out. Zeglar alone is worth going for, and of course there is a score that never gets old. Be entertained by the spectacle.
And who is behind such curation? Lloyd is the latest in a long line of white British men who have less translated than reproduced Evita for their contemporary audiences. Turn by turn each has told a version of Eva Perón‘s life that is seductive yet bears less resemblance to its real-world counterpart. As Lloyd takes up the mantle, there is no pretence of realism, no attempt to stage the Casa Rosada. The masses that Evita took to heart are omnipresent but garbed in drab grey uniforms, stripped of humanity in service of constructing Evita’s deity.
By the final scenes, that construction becomes literal. The grey-garbed masses assemble Zegler into her final form: wig, sequins, silhouette. A woman not revealed, but rebuilt. The institution absorbs her completely, preserving only what serves its perpetuation. Each generation of white British auteurs has preserved Evita by recreating her further from truth. Lloyd may be the first honest enough to proclaim that this is the hollowness of our politics: in this contrived digital world where political authenticity has little currency, we have the spectacle we crave.
NEED TO KNOW: EVITA is playing at the London Palladium 8 Argyll St, London W1F 7TF from Saturday 14 June – Saturday 6 September 2025
