Rainbow tour The 25th-anniversary return of Evita BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Evita Lyrics by Tim Rice. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Production supervised by Harold Prince. Choreography and Prince’s direction reproduced by Larry Fuller. Costumes and original set design by Tim O’Brien. Set adapted by James Fouchard. Lighting by Richard Winkler. Musical director Kevin Farrell. With Kathy Voytko, Bradley Dean, Philip Hernandez, Gabriel Burrafato, and Kate Manning. At the Colonial Theatre through November 14.

It may be "A New Argentina," as the first-act finale shouts, but it’s an old Evita. The touring production that’s making its debut at the Colonial Theatre has been "supervised" by original director Harold Prince, with hands-on directorial duplication by original choreographer Larry Fuller. So what’s on stage is as close as you can get to the Tony-winning staging that opened on Broadway in 1979 (a year after its London premiere), minus the pipes of Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin. The good news is that Prince’s Erwin Piscator–inspired multimedia staging still bristles, and that Evita, with its Latin-infiltrated melodies and clever lyrics, is the one show that makes you wish Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had not gotten divorced.

Cleaned-up slut turned Argentine first lady Eva Perón (1919–1952) would seem an unlikely subject for a pop opera. But in fact, the story of her unlikely deification and untimely death, played out against a political backdrop of populist fervor and Machiavellian manipulation, nicely fits the mantle of Brechtian showmanship Prince designed for it. The director later called Pacific Overtures a documentary vaudeville, but so is Evita, a hot-spot tour of a legendary life that both glamorizes and condemns its subject — with whom it shares a sort of show-biz genius. Nowhere in the current revival is this more obvious than in the subtle exaggeration of the famed white strapless dress in which, at her husband’s inauguration, Eva sings "Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina." That dress, with its accompanying blond wig (parted in the middle and backed by an elegant braided chignon), could turn anyone from Lupone to Madonna to Miss Piggy into Evita. And in the new production, the freestanding explosion of organza seems more than before to have a life of its own, symbolizing, as the woman in it croons of her veracity, the triumph of image over truth.

Unfolding as it were from a coffin, accompanied by an overhead montage of images from the real Eva Perón’s life, and MC’d by an agitating Che Guevara, Evita remains a triumph of stagecraft — which is put to the service, at this point in the Princely career, of a musical with some substance. (It’s hard not to reflect that the director later applied his smoke and mirrors to The Phantom of the Opera.) Choreographer Fuller, too, makes ironic contributions, among them the show’s contrapuntal phalanxes of soldiers and swells and its rocking musical chairs for "The Art of the Possible." Even the score has its share of pizzazz, especially in the section that begins with "High Flying Adored" and then propels the determined first lady from her dressing table to the capitals of Europe, where she drags Argentina along like a handbag.

As for our missing the original Broadway stars, this 25th-anniversary reproduction tries to derail such nostalgia, offering not new and different icons (as the 1996 film did in Madonna and Antonio Banderas) but, in unknowns Kathy Voytko and Bradley Dean, performers who do their best to channel the bravura, tonsil-stretching antics of Lupone and Patinkin. She’s small, tough, and given to posing; he brandishes Patinkin’s high tenor and over-the-top theatrics. Both are talented singers, though not in a league with the ones of whom they’re meant to be clones.

Dean catches the show-biz aspect of the show’s Che, hectoring Eva in song and dance when he’s not being roughed up by Perón’s strongmen. Voytko has a pretty voice when she doesn’t force it; she’s at her best on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, tenderly begging the descamisados to jam their tear ducts. Here, gliding tentatively forward like some sacrificial bride, the actress combines manipulation with sincere emotion, establishing Eva as an ambitious cookie who has started to believe her own "Santa Evita" hype. But when Lloyd Webber tucks those rhythmic counter-chops of dissonance into his melodies (as in "Buenos Aires"), she screeches.

Philip Hernandez is a powerful if wooden presence as Perón; Gabriel Burrafato brings slink to tango singer Magaldi and his "On This Night of a Thousand Stars"; petite Kate Manning wraps a plaintive soprano around the show’s sweetly forlorn ditty for Perón’s ousted mistress, "Another Suitcase in Another Hall." The ensemble, morphing fervently from one social class to another and from rite to rally to rite, is suitably vigorous. But Evita, smudged with the fingerprints of unlikely Broadway babies Piscator, Brecht, and Meyerhold, is Prince’s wind-up toy — no wonder he doesn’t want anyone else to play with it.