Music & Songs From Evita

Album review

After Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Evita opened in London in 1978 with Elaine Paige in the starring role of Eva Peron (wife of the Argentine dictator Juan Peron in the 1940s and ‘50s), Marti Webb became Paige's stand-in, eventually inheriting the part. (She also became a favorite of Lloyd Webber, who went on to write the show Tell Me on a Sunday especially for her.) But generally it's those who create roles who get to appear on "original" cast albums, not replacements, however talented they may be. Here, Webb finally gets the chance to commit her musical interpretation of Evita on disc, even as she returns to the part on-stage in a British revival. Having celebrated her 50th birthday, Webb may be a little long in the tooth for a character first glimpsed as a teenage who died at 33, but that isn't a problem when you can't see her. The recording is billed as a Marti Webb artist album, but it might be called a studio cast album, since Webb is in character and so are other performers who sometimes take the spotlight. (In fact, Webb does not appear at all on five of the twelve tracks.) Or, it might be considered a various-artists album, since the singers do not always stick to single characters. Carl Wayne sings the part of Juan Peron in "I'd Be Surprisingly Good for You"; becomes Che in "Waltz for Eva and Che"; and portrays Magaldi in "On This Night of a Thousand Stars" and "Eva Beware of the City." Dave Willetts is Che in "High Flying Adored," and Jess Conrad takes the same part for "Oh What a Circus." Webb, meanwhile, switches over to the role of Peron's hapless mistress (whom Evita replaces) in "Another Suitcase in Another Hall." She is convincingly shy and melancholy on that track, adopting a wholly different persona from her bold and brassy Evita on the rest of the album. This recording is really just a highlights disc presenting a handful of the songs out of order from the stage production. But Webb demonstrates that she can hold her own with Julie Covington (who really originated Evita on the original studio album), Paige, and even Broadway's Patti LuPone. So, Lloyd Webber and musical theater fans should give this album a listen.

© William Ruhlmann /TiVo