Remember when one of the joys of being an actor was the opportunity to play characters of all kinds of social and ethnic backgrounds? In these politically-correct times, thanks in part to the brouhaha over Jonathan Pryce and Miss Saigon, that sort of opportunity is temporarily in abeyance. Thus we have this Class A staging of Evita, perhaps the most powerful and most likely to last of the Lloyd Webber musicals, in which the three principal characters are played by Latino actors. All well and good, but once you get past the initial requirement of birth provenance, how well-suited are they to these demanding roles? In two out of three cases -- the edgy, vibrant Che of Raul Esparza and the menacing Peron of Raymond Jaramillo McLeod - the results justify the means. These are actors who would perform honorably no matter what their background.
But in the crucial central role, Natalie Toro's Eva Peron comes up short. She has all the notes for the vocal demands of the music -- the high notes in the rangy "Rainbow High" are dead on, an achievement even the best of past Evitas sometimes only approximated -- but her vocal production involves a nasal, Kewpie-doll sound that quickly becomes grating. And her interest appears mainly in conveying the comic aspects of the character. She always seems to be playing at being a dictator; there is never a sense of the drive, the ambition that motivated the real Evita and that supplies the unifying force of the show.
This is doubly a shame, because the production that surrounds this imperfect center is excellent. Larry Fuller, the original choreographer, recreates his own staging and reproduces Harold Prince's original direction with care and attention to detail. The sets and projections reproduce the look of the original mounting; the ensemble is well drilled and expert; and in the only other roles of any consequence, Tom Flynn is an engagingly smarmy Magaldi, and Angela Covington has her touching moment as Peron's discarded mistress (for those familiar only with the film, she's the one who actually sings "Another Suitcase in Another Hall"). The political correctness in the casting seems not to have extended beyond the top of the roster, but the general expertise of the company makes that requirement academic. Overall, if this otherwise skilled re-creation of Evita is to journey to Broadway, it would do well to toughen its center, or risk foundering.
