Evita relaunched in London with Argentine star

LONDON - Evita came full circle on yesterday with Andrew Lloyd Webber reviving the Seventies musical in London with Argentine star Elena Roger in the lead role.

Roger, a fan of Madonna in the film version, was born in 1974, the year when Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice started work on what was to become one of their most successful musicals.

Roger, who has appeared back home in Buenos Aires productions of Saturday Night Fever and Les Miserables, faced the ordeal of singing Don't Cry for Me Argentina at a packed press launch with Lloyd Webber at the piano.

Asked if she was nervous about following in Madonna's footsteps playing Eva Peron, Roger joked: "My height is OK. But please no comparisons. She was wonderful in the film."

Roger said of Peron: "I think everybody would love to do this role because she's a very important woman in history who is known all over.

"She was very strong and fought against a lot of the problems that she had."

Lloyd Webber said he had no plans to write any new songs for the show, which opens in June.

But he will take the opportunity of reworking the orchestration for the show about the charismatic wife of Argentine leader Juan Peron. She died of cancer in 1952.

"I wanted to re-look at the orchestrations," he said. "I felt from a musical point of view I could bring something new to it.

"For a long time I felt that Tim Rice and I didn't know that much about Latin American music at the time. There is so much more music available to us now than there was in the 70s."

Rice, appropriately, joined the London launch by video from Argentina, where he is currently managing a touring English cricket team headed by former England captain Mike Gatting.

Lloyd Webber called it the "pinnacle" of his collaboration with Rice. The pair also wrote Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat together.

Lloyd Webber's latest musical Woman in White was a box office disappointment, closing in London next month after just 19 months.

In contrast, Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera has just overtaken his own show Cats to become the longest-running musical in the history of Broadway.

- REUTERS