Strong Recommend: Evita at London Palladium

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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello, welcome to Strong Message Here.

Strong Recommend.

Our cultural recommendations for the summer and a look at their impact on language.

I'm Amanda Nucci.

I'm Helen Lewis.

And you're going to recommend something this week, something you've attended.

I'm going to recommend Standing in the Street.

Controversial, I know.

So there is a new production of Evita, which is on throughout the summer with Rachel Ziegler, who was in Westside Story and Snow White, directed by Jamie Lloyd, who is quite a buzzy director.

He did Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Schirtzinger.

Anyway, the point about this is that I saw it inside the theatre, which I actually wouldn't recommend because the tickets are very expensive and the connective tissue in the play has been removed.

Right.

So if you don't.

It's not a great review so far, is it?

So it's sort of a kind of more of a concert version.

For example, there are some very weird things about Avita, which I only know now, such as the narrator in it is Che Guevara.

Yes.

Which I think they put in on the basis of who's South American that people will have heard of.

That guy's on the t-shirts.

But this is not mentioned in this production because I think they just thought that was too rogue.

But anyway, so unless you're a fan of 1950s Argentinian politics or already Avita, you may be slightly bemused.

The bit I would recommend is going and watching.

The big trick in this production is that Rachel Zieger performs Don't Cry for Me Argentina on the balcony outside the London Palladium, which is right near Oxford Circus tube station in London.

And obviously she's doing that about, I think, about 9 p.m.

on the on weeknight evenings and then obviously the matinee in the afternoon.

So if you happen to be in the centre of London, there is essentially a kind of great free show.

It is the banger

in the show.

So hang on.

So how did you feel being inside the theatre when this happened outside?

Well, I knew people who were quite angry about the fact that she's doing the best song and inside the theatre you watch it on a screen.

But there was this incredible moment.

So the whole the premise of the song is that this is a populist leader using language to say I'm on your side.

I'm one of the people, you know, even as she's spending a huge amount of money on diamonds and possibly a lot of it's ending up in Switzerland.

Yeah.

And is basically singing it over some past and pizza stalls around the back of

a burst of troop station.

Yes.

Yeah.

Don't craft me Argentinian steakhouse is the version of this.

But but what's kind of amazing about that is you watch it and the cat, there's a cameraman with her and she's in the inside of the theatre and then she comes around the corner and you suddenly suddenly see, for free, a load of extras essentially standing on the street.

And there was a collective gasp in the theatre of the fact that somebody's going to do this crowd scene, and a crowd has turned up for it.

And that was cool.

So, are these people who spontaneously come along to, or who know when it happens and will come regularly, or are these people added to by the theatre as part of the production?

No.

All right, so it's Joe and Joanna public?

It is.

It has become a kind of hallmark of Jamie Lloyd's direction that he, and I think he's borrowed this from the Belgian director Evo Van Hover.

We'll often have a bit where someone goes outside the theatre.

So in Sunset Boulevard, the lead actor from that sang the song Sunset Boulevard while doing a tour all through the backstage, including a cutout of Andrew Lloyd Weber, which was a strange meta-fictional reference, and then comes into the theatre to finish it.

But you do then get the possibility of people accosting him in the street or whatever it might be.

His Romeo and Juliet, he put Tom Holland of Spider-Man fame up on the roof to do a bit of it.

Excellent.

For no real reason.

Once, as a student,

when I was doing slightly pretentious comedy, I once did a bit on Copernican theatre, which is,

so Copernicus said, you know, the earth is not at the center of the heavens.

Yeah.

The earth actually revolves around the sun.

And my character,

because I don't want you to think it was me that I genuinely thought this, my character was insisting, therefore, that the center of the attention in the production shouldn't be the stage.

But it's basically an excuse for me to get a member of the audience out and go outside, first backstage and then out or to the street with him while live mic'd up and give him things to say.

So we perform, we perform a comedy routine that I'd just give him or her the cues to say.

And it always worked.

Whoever I picked on and took out, I would always go for a friendly face.

They would do it.

I mean, it's frightening as well what people will do if you just tell them to.

But it kind of works.

That's funny because actually, I mean, yeah, you're right.

It is a kind of comment on populism to some extent, right?

Which is that people see something that other people like and they're interested in it and they want and that are the kind of herd mentality.

And I wonder if the crowds are growing now for this regular performance.

Oh, yeah, I think it's become a thing.

It's become a sort of tourist attraction.

But that's, you know, it's free when the tickets to see this are very, very expensive.

Do you think a busking troop will come along and put Evita outside, but for the Don't Cry for Me, they'll then disappear inside the foyer to sing it?

Oh, I like that.

You do it in verse with Evita.

Yeah, maybe that's the next thing: is you do all of the production of the street apart from one song, and that's all the songs.

A convex Evita and a concave Evita, if you will.

But let me go back to your audience participation because that bothers me.

I would find that terrifying.

Did it ever go wrong?

Not that I can remember.

No, I mean, it was quite funny and quite short.

And it was more the joke was it ran long enough for the...

audience to find it funny that I was doing it.

Once that laugh was out the way, I didn't hang around much longer with my poor volunteer.

It's one of the things I find hardest about doing things that are funny, like panel shows, is having that confidence that you give something the structure of a joke and people will laugh.

Or like in your case, having the confidence to go, I'm gonna let this be awkward and uncomfortable for a bit and then they'll find it funny.

Oh yes, I was I mean I was soiling myself the first time I tried it but I was then relieved that it worked and then I sort of thoroughly enjoyed I kind of looked forward to it every evening really.

Well no a lot of what you see of comedy being advertised on Instagram reels or TikTok is crowd work.

Yes.

Because the comedians have worked out they don't want to give away their set that they do every night but if they've got fresh material that they can do and they can show you.

And also again it is that thing where people will just say things.

They'll go like what do you do for a job and they go I work for an arms manufacturer.

And you think, lie, you're in a comedy, lie.

Just say, you know, I'm a postman.

Don't give them this material.

What are you doing, people?

Right.

Well, I'm going to head on down at nine o'clock and whatever.

And maybe for the matinee at

just to watch Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.

Thank you very much for that recommendation.

Evita is still on at the London Palladium until at least September.

We'll be back next week with a recommendation from me, a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald.

I won't tell you which one yet.

Just as if somehow you're going to spend the next seven days worrying.

People were having sweepstakes.

Come on, I think it's the beginning of spring.

No, I think it's the blue flower.

Until then, make sure you've subscribed to our feed on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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