Rachel Zegler is enthralling as Evita in this gorgeous sensory overload of a show

News that Rachel Zegler would sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from the Palladium’s ornate balcony, entertaining the weary shoppers on the streets below instead of the paying audience inside, was initially met with a certain amount of disapproval. Now, however, director Jamie Lloyd’s gambit looks less like a gimmick, more like the musical theatre stunt of the century, as vast crowds gather nightly for a free dose of a pricey, potentially exclusionary artform.

Much like the dictator that Evita centres on, the play’s composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, loses everything if he loses touch with the people who raised him up – and this populist gesture is emblematic of Jamie Lloyd’s big, bold, stadium rally of a staging, with its virtuoso star Zegler romancing a rapt audience both inside and outside the theatre’s walls.

There’s something deeply queasy about applauding Evita – the divisive Argentinian figure who some still idolise, but many feel helped her dictator husband Juan Perón squander the nation’s wealth on self-aggrandising schemes. Lloyd leans into that sickly quality by making this production too much in every sense: too loud, too bright, too sexual. Huge spotlights half-blind the audience as their antihero owns the stage, Zegler prancing like Ariana Grande in black satin underwear, all self-absorption and petulance.

Her voice has an emotive purity to it that captures the spoilt, childlike quality of the super-rich, too used to adoration to be able to contemplate life without it. Zegler beautifully portrays Evita as a natural performer who effortlessly acts her way out of small-town mediocrity, pretending to fall for men who can help her get gigs, then snapping out of it just as fast. When she marries Perón, her new position as dictator’s wife is the ultimate role.

Zegler’s balcony performance of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” is the first time she appears fully clothed: a glittering white gown symbolic of the part she is playing, fulfilled at last (it’s at around 8.40pm, in case you want to catch it from outside). The audience inside the theatre see her performing on a giant cinema screen, straight out of a slushy mid-century Hollywood rags-to-riches story.

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The reality isn’t so pretty, as Che, our narrator and Evita’s biggest critic, points out. In other productions, he’s portrayed as a rough-and-ready revolutionary – here, Diego Andres Rodriguez lends a puppyish sweetness to the character, in thrall to this woman even as he calls out her worst excesses. Around them, choreographer Fabian Aloise and designer Soutra Gilmour create a compelling, sharply delineated vision of mid-century Argentina: its gilded, twirling aristocrats; its muscular soldiers; its ordinary people cascading like waves over a steeply stepped stage.

As in his wildly successful revival of Sunset Boulevard, Lloyd’s approach here is to match the maximalism of Lloyd Webber’s luxuriant score with sumptuous, all-enveloping imagery while simultaneously cutting through that richness with moments of surprising irony. Evita’s discarded lovers look like bewildered middle-managers who’ve been handed their notice. An adorable child, dressed just like Evita, smiles sweetly at a charity fundraiser – then grabs a fistful of banknotes like a tiny gangster.

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Anyone who’s been following Lloyd’s recent tidal wave of West End shows will recognise the directorial strategies here: the euphoria-inducing confetti cannon from Much Ado About Nothing, the gory splashes of blood from Sunset Boulevard (front row, leave your dry-clean-only jackets at home).

It’s not quite subtle enough a language to expose or expand on Evita’s half-hidden politics – the bones that hold up this fleshy beast of a play; instead, this gorgeous sensory overload of a show is its own comment on the rising tide of fascism. Populism is sexy, captivating, overpowering – a way for weary people to escape the dull realities of right and wrong. You know there’s something deeply twisted under that pretty shiny surface, but, like the audiences of Evita, you’re powerless to resist.

At the London Palladium until 6 September 2025