Review: Rachel Zegler Is High-Flying, Adored, and Live-Streamed in Jamie Lloyd's West End Evita

Director Jamie Lloyd sparked a Broadway stir when he walked Tom Francis through the streets of New York for the three-time Tony Award-winning revival of Sunset Blvd., currently entering its final weeks in New York. But Sunset was but a prelude to the new phenomenon: Rachel Zegler, in full Eva Péron attire, standing on the balcony outside the London Palladium, singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” to the ticketless public beneath her.

Sensationalist headlines claimed punters in the auditorium were feeling shortchanged that the show’s most iconic number was now being delivered via a screen rather than witnessed live. Headlines be damned. Just as it did with Francis, the live-stream works superbly here. For a show that revels in an abstract, intangible world, the seven-minute sequence depicts the infamous wife of Argentine dictator Juan Péron in hyper-realistic HD clarity. Suddenly, history appears to us in meter-high detail.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The live-stream balcony scene is only one of many flourishes in Lloyd’s latest production, now settling in for a limited summer season (a Broadway transfer must surely follow).

The typically minimalist Lloyd style returns here. Gone are the elaborate, lavish sets of Christopher Oram’s most-recent 2012 Broadway iteration. On longtime Lloyd collaborator Soutra Gilmour’s bleachers, Eva’s rise to fame seems to take place in some twisted, abstract version of Beyoncé’s iconic 2018 Coachella act—the leading starlet flanked by a small army of writhing bodies, overseen with pinpoint precision by choreographer Fabian Aloise, another Lloyd collaborator. It’s all augmented by lighting designer Jon Clark, able to play with a rainbow’s worth of shades.

Aloise’s contributions, especially in numbers like “Buenos Aires” and “A New Argentina,” are as profoundly important to the show’s overall texture as Lloyd’s. It is he who, through the sheer act of placing bodies onstage, conjures up a fickle miasma of 1940s Argentina, a nation caught in the wallowing chaos of political revolution. Only a select choice of props—balloons, confetti, a splash of paint—help to push the plot along.

In this hazy Palladium dreamspace, Eva and her nemesis-cum-narrator Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez) jostle over her legacy like two spirits wrestling in purgatory. Was she truly a woman of the people whose pragmatism sat underneath a bedrock of idealism, or was she some Machiavellian exploiter out to claim as much Argentine wealth and fame for herself as possible? The answer is as elusive as some of Lloyd’s directorial choices. It’s a show that has as much to say about how Eva is now perceived, as a result of Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical, as it is about Eva herself.

In one moment, a member of the ensemble dons a costume that directly references Madonna (who played Eva onscreen) and her Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra. Lloyd asks an important question: if a musical sanitizes and glorifies a deeply controversial figure and turns her into a mythic performance, where does the reality remain?

At the heart of it all is Zegler, only at the start of what is sure to be a sensational career. Evita is a gigantic sing, but Zegler makes it look as easy as a Saturday matinee at a local production of Bye Bye Birdie. She cruises through numbers like “Rainbow High” and “You Must Love Me” with style, giving her Eva a cynical, cheeky poise that explains her mass appeal and political seduction.

Another star-in-the-making is Rodriguez, who left Sunset on Broadway early to join Zegler in London. Almost never off-stage, he gues us through the ethereal world Lloyd paints.

Would Broadway take to it? I expect a similar outcome to Sunset Blvd., heady praise but perhaps with a few additional grumbles. Either way, Zegler will leave London high-flying, adored, and heavily garlanded.