*Evita* review

at Lake City Playhouse through Oct. 10
(long version; for print on Sept. 23 in The Inlander, this'll have to be cut in half)

They’re the moments when you hold your breath.

They’re the big solo dramatic songs in musical theater: “The Impossible Dream,” “Bring Him Home,” “Send in the Clowns,” “Rose’s Turn.” Everybody knows the tune, everybody’s hoping for good but fearing they’ll get less, and no one’s really expecting tonight’s performance to live up to any ideals.

Singing the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, Alyssa Day appears early on as the young, dark-haired social climber. Day briefly sings “Don’t cry for me,” but director Abbey Crawford had turned it into a trio with two other women, and it didn’t have the big build-up that the set-piece aria gets early in Act Two. (Everybody knows the big moment arrives soon after intermission.)
So the political-rally scene finally arrives, and Day comes out in her glittering white princess dress, and she holds hands with her husband, Juan Peron, and a dozen people in the crowd are clamoring for her, and she ascends her little rostrum, and she sings the opening two warm-up verses (“I had to let it happen, I had to change“), but those are just for building up the suspense, and then she hits the chorus (imploring the people not to cry for her, when you know that she wants them to cry for her), and she hit it solid, she really knocked it out of the park — she spread her arms wide and created moments of vocal beauty, and you could feel the relief and the happiness in the audience, that whatever shortcomings this production might have (and it has them, how could it not?), the ticket-buyers could go home feeling that “Well, they got that right, they got Evita’s big highlight-reel sequence right.”
It was a stirring, lyrical moment, full of Evita’s admirable/flawed character (her sincere desire to help the common people, her sincere desire to glorify herself), and Day sang it with full-throated expression, and it was simply lovely.

And then a remarkable thing happened.
The chorus had been chanting Evita’s name, but now they were humming along. Day, though, remained facing forward, facing the audience, as if we were the shirtless ones, Evita’s beloved descamisados. And several playgoers seated near me started humming along — even the husband who’d been dragged along by his wife, he was humming along too.
A fleeting moment of interactivity turned us into political reformers — and it made Day’s appeal as Evita all the more alluring.

But let’s not get carried away here. This is still a community-theater production of Evita. The big emotional crescendos sometimes sound tinny (and lacking in fullness) when performed by just two keyboards, guitar and drums. Dance steps were often predictable, hesitant, over-crowded. In the narrator role of Che Guevara, Todd Kehne lacks vocal power. Almost nobody onstage looks even vaguely Hispanic. Long stretches of Act Two lean too much on politics and not enough on melody. Both the stage direction and the musical direction opt for a deliberate pace. (An artistic choice, or just the performers’ tentativeness?)

On the positive side, Abbey Crawford directs inventively, with scenes sometimes divided in thirds and developing rapidly; with surprise entrances; and with boisterous crowd scenes (despite limited numbers).
As Evita’s first boyfriend-tool, Agustin Magaldi, Dan McKeever adds hip-shimmies and exaggerated modulations to “On This Night of a Thousand Stars,” making the character’s celebrity-appeal more persuasive (and amusing) than in most productions. When he needs to, McKeever can project impressively.
Kehne pulls off the cynicism of Che’s narrator role with a sarcastic, hands-in-pockets stroll and convincing anger in his shouted cries of revolutionary defiance, and he effectively leads a harmonizing male trio during the dismissal of Peron’s earlier mistress, “Another Suitcase, Another Hall.” The crowd energy for the first-act finale, “A New Argentina,” was strong.
Kent Kimball, full of stentorian solemnity as Juan Peron, knows how to enact a song’s nuances, as when he stands on the balcony of the Casa Rosada and pretends to be a general who’s pretending to have populist sentiments (“our great nation is awakening”).
Both Perons flirt politically (and otherwise, and well) in “Charity Concert” (“I’d be surprisingly good for you”).
In addition to her singing (which during Act One, truth be told, got screechy and indistinct in the higher register), Day’s acting is effective. When Evita rises to power, for example, Day is visibly more confident and flirtier. During Eva’s final decline, it wasn’t just a quick makeup job that made Day seem visibly ill and weakened.
Jamie Russell’s costumes — Evita’s gowns, the gaggle of high-society women all in black, Magaldi’s sequined vest — created illusions of grandeur on (what was presumably) a limited budget.

All in all, Lake City’s new regime change under Generalissimo George Green (its new executive artistic director) has taken on an ambitious production and largely succeeded with it. Day, in particular, excels in the title role. Not only does she sing beautifully, but she’s also convincing as a social climber and social reformer who wants to leave Argentina a better place.
Similarly, under Green’s leadership, Lake City has made strides. The place just feels different — new signs, new paint, new lots of things, and a new feeling throughout. If the playhouse can achieve this much positive change in just the few months since Green took over, then the rest of its 50th season is likely on an upward trajectory.
Maybe then even more folks will fill the seats — and when the big moments come, maybe they’ll hold their breath.

Evita has scheduled the revolution for Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30 pm and Sundays at 2 pm through Oct. 10 at Lake City Playhouse, 1320 E. Garden Ave., Coeur d’Alene. Tickets: $19; $17, veterans and students; $15, seniors; $10, student rush; $9, children. Visit lakecityplayhouse.org or call (208) 667-1323.

[ photo by Young Kwak for The Pacific Northwest Inlander: Alyssa Day as Eva Peron and Kent Kimball as Juan Peron in Evita, directed by Abbey Crawford at Lake City Playhouse in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Sept.-Oct. 2010]