“"Instead of government, we had a stage."” Che, Evita, Tim Rice / Andrew Lloyd Webber
Eva Perón died at the age of thirty-three, but age had long ceased to be a sufficient measure to tell her life story. In just a few years, Eva Duarte traversed a distance not measured in kilometers between Los Toldos and Buenos Aires, but between what the world seemed to have in store for her and what she chose to conquer. A radio and film actress, she became close to Juan Domingo Perón, married him, and became First Lady of Argentina, occupying a position of enormous political and social visibility until her death in 1952.
But the facts say very little about Eva Perón. Perhaps because certain lives, after they end, can no longer be told solely by what happened. They come to depend on who remembers them, who loves them, who hates them, and above all, who continues to need them. Eva became Evita precisely in that space, when the woman began to disappear behind the persona and the persona became greater than the woman.
It was this border that we encountered on July 10th, in Porto Coliseum. The production of Yellow Star Company, with staging of Paulo Sousa Costa, puts Sofia Escobar in the role of Eva Perón, Diogo Morgado like Che and Diogo de Carvalho as Juan Perón. The musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber e Tim Rice It takes the form of a virtually continuous rock opera, making Che a kind of critical conscience who observes, comments on, and questions Eva's rise.
Avoid It continues to work so well because it was never truly a story about Argentina in the 1940s. It's a story about something much older and, paradoxically, much more contemporary: the human need to be seen.
Eva wants to get to Buenos Aires because she believes a greater version of herself exists elsewhere. She wants to be recognized, admired, desired. Then she discovers that being seen isn't enough. She needs to remain in the memory of those who look. It is at that moment that Evita is born.
Sofia Escobar constructs this transformation with impressive confidence. The young woman, driven by ambition, arrives in the city learning the language of the places she intends to enter, understanding who she needs to meet, when she should appear, and, above all, how she should appear. Her voice, naturally, is one of the great strengths of her performance, but it would be unfair to reduce Sofia Escobar's work solely to her vocal ability. The most interesting aspect lies in how her body, gaze, and gestures become progressively more controlled. Eva ceases to simply exist in the presence of others and begins to represent what others expect her to be.
The costumes help tell this metamorphosis story. The initial simplicity gives way to elegance, rigor, jewelry, and the carefully styled hair that became associated with the image of Eva Perón. Part of this visual universe culminates in the costumes designed specifically for Sofia Escobar, in a production where the wardrobe deliberately follows the character's rise.
But in Avoid Clothing is never just clothing. It's armor.
The more perfect the outward image becomes, the harder it is to perceive the woman beneath. And perhaps this is one of the ideas that makes the show unsettlingly relevant today. We live in a time when almost everyone carries a small balcony of the Casa Rosada in their pocket. A place from which we choose the framing, the lighting, the words, and the version of ourselves that we want to show the world.
We no longer need thousands of people gathered in a square. A screen is enough.
The tools have changed, but the desire to control how others see us hasn't entirely changed.
Perhaps that's why it's so difficult to answer the question that runs through our minds. AvoidWhere does authenticity end and representation begin? The question seems simple when applied to Eva Perón, but it becomes much more uncomfortable when we apply it to ourselves. How many times do we choose a photograph because it looks more like what we would like to be than what we are? How many times do we transform a trip, a meal, a relationship, or even a moment of happiness into an image before we have truly lived what we want to show?
Eva realized long before social media that image is not just a consequence of power. It can be one of its forms.
That's also why Che is indispensable.
Diogo Morgado takes the stage as someone who refuses to accept what he sees without asking questions. Che doesn't exist merely to narrate. He exists to introduce doubt. When Eva seduces, he is suspicious. When the crowd believes, he questions. When myth threatens to become absolute, he seeks the fissure through which reality can re-enter.
The confrontation between the two is particularly interesting because it doesn't need to decide who is right. Eva constructs a narrative about herself. Che tries to dismantle it. Between the two of them, we are left, forced to do what we so often fail to do when someone presents us with a sufficiently seductive story: to think.
And perhaps therein lies one of its greatest virtues. Avoid. The work does not present us with a simple Eva Perón. The historical figure remains controversial, associated simultaneously with popular mobilization and the social policies of Peronism, but also with criticisms directed at Juan Perón's regime and the way political power constructed and used his public image. The musical itself explores this tension through the constant confrontation between Eva and Che.
Diogo Morgado takes on this role with a harsher and more ironic tone, creating the necessary counterpoint to Sofia Escobar's emotional intensity. He doesn't seek to compete with Eva for center stage because Che, in a way, belongs to the periphery. It is from that place that he observes best. And there are moments when we would even like this confrontation to be even more uncomfortable, for the proximity between the two to produce greater tension, because it is precisely when the performance forces us to distrust what we have just felt that it becomes most interesting.
Diogo de Carvalho finds in Juan Perón another type of presence. More restrained, less luminous, almost inevitably secondary to the strength of Eva. The irony is evident: Perón formally possesses the power, but it is Evita who occupies the memory. One signs, the other remains in the photographs. One governs, the other transforms herself into an image.
And no image of Eva Perón became more powerful than that balcony.
When it arrives Don't Cry for Me, Argentina, We also arrive at the moment we all know even before the show begins. That's the danger of overly famous songs: they carry with them all the versions we've heard before. Patti LuPone, Elaine Paige, Madonna, and so many other Evitas enter the room with us.
Sofia Escobar manages to do the most difficult thing. She doesn't try to overcome that memory through excess.
Contains.
Before the crowd, Eva appears simultaneously enormous and vulnerable. It is probably the moment when the distance between woman and symbol becomes smallest. We don't know if we are witnessing the sincere declaration of someone who deeply believes in their own words or the perfect representation of someone who has learned exactly what a crowd wants to hear.
Perhaps even Eve couldn't distinguish one from the other yet.
And maybe we don't either.
Because pretending for long enough to be what we would like to be can end up changing the answer to the question of who we really are. The mask doesn't necessarily hide the face. Sometimes it molds the face until it's no longer possible to separate them.
That's where the disease introduces a different kind of brutality into the spectacle.
Throughout almost all of the life we see on stage, Eva struggles to control the narrative. She controls her clothes, her gestures, her entrance into a room, her relationship with the audience, Eva's transformation into Evita. Until she discovers that there is always something that escapes our control.
The body.
Mortality has this unkindness. It is not impressed by the number of people in a square.
The woman who had learned to become larger than life then begins to shrink within her own body. And the contrast is devastating because we realize that the image can defy almost everything, except time.
Or maybe it could.
Eva Perón died. Evita survived.
It remained in Argentina, in photographs, in collective memory, in discussions surrounding Peronism. It then remained in the songs of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, in the West End, on Broadway, in film, and in every actress who returned to that balcony. The musical premiered in London in 1978, and since then Eva has been successively reinterpreted, transforming a historical Argentine figure into a character recognized far beyond the country's borders.
That night in Porto, it was Sofia Escobar who once again lent her body and voice to the role.
When the lights of the Colosseum come on and we return to the street, Evita leaves us with a question that perhaps makes even more sense today than when Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber first brought it to the stage.
We live surrounded by images and have learned to distrust them, yet we continue to fall in love with what they represent. We follow people we've never met, mourn the deaths of strangers, and discuss public figures as if we knew what exists when the cameras are off. We've never had access to so many lives, and perhaps it has never been so difficult to know where a person ends and the character we construct of them begins.
Eva Perón understood the power of that distance.
Avoid He noticed something even more disturbing.
The myth is not built solely by those on the sidelines.
You always need someone down here watching.
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