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After spending the first 70 or so years of his life being aggressively uncool, something seemed to have snapped in Andrew Lloyd Webber with the failure of his 2021 musical Cinderella and the 2023 revival of his Aspects of Love, which was all but run out of town by a pitchfork wielding mob.
Hip director Jamie Lloyd had already made a well-received 2019 production of Evita for the Open Air Theatre. But the rapturous reception afforded to Lloyd’s 2023 revival of Sunset Boulevard – currently sitting pretty on Broadway – clearly persuaded Webber to go all in with the tattooed experimentalist. Lloyd has been announced as the director of Webber’s next musical, entitled The Illusionist. And now he’ll be bringing Evita to the West End, where it’ll run at the massive London Palladium next summer.
Despite its extremely questionable relationship with historic fact, Evita is widely regarded as Webber’s greatest musical, certainly the best of his collaborations with his most famous collaborator Tim Rice. Taking a somewhat romanticised take on the story of Argentine politician Eva Peron, Evita combines Webber and Rice’s most memorable character with some of their greatest songs – notably ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’, ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’ and ‘You Must Love Me’ (famously all hits for Madonna, who did a film version in 1996).
Lloyd’s 2019 production was well-received – including four stars from Time Out – but relatively low key by his standards, with no huge celebrity names in it and with a relatively short run. Post-pandemic he’s had a string of enormous hits and is probably the most in-demand director in the world at the moment: his production of The Tempest starring Sigourney Weaver is about to open in the West End, followed by Much Ado About Nothing starring Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell; Evita will come next, followed by his Broadway Waiting for Godot starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters.
Whether we get a huge name lead for Evita is TBC, but for a summer run the show’s rep combined with Lloyd’s should be more than enough to do the business, in what’s going to be a partly reworked update of the 2019 production.
Evita will run at the London Palladium Jun 14-Sep 6 2025. Tickets will go on sale next year – sign up at www.evitathemusical.com to be the first to hear when.