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Evita, the Society of the Spectacle and the Advent of the Megamusical
Vagelis Siropoulos
Abstract (E): Using Evita (1978) as a case study, the article defines in aesthetic terms what has been derogatorily and summarily dismissed by many critics as spectacle in Andrew Lloyd Webber‟s megamusicals and investigates the reasons for their vast popularity. Cultural theory, from Walter Benjamin to Guy Debord and Fredric Jameson, shows that megamusicals, with their almost obsessive concentration on the visual aspects of the performance and the transformation of spectatorship into an overwhelming immersive experience, become emblematic of the socio-economic and phenomenological function of spectacle in postmodern culture – a fact that explains their immense commercial success. Moreover, the article argues that the current colonization of Broadway by spectacle has a long history, tracing anticipatory tendencies, which reflect how a spectacular society‟s new modes of technologically mediated perception have gradually modified and shaped Broadway‟s aesthetic production in the twentieth century.
Abstract (F): À partir de l‟exemple d‟Evita (1978), cet article propose une définition esthétique des supercomédies musicales d‟Andrew Lloyd Webber, que la critique a souvent et sans trop y réfléchir écartées comme privées de toute valeur, et s‟interroge sur les raisons de leur popularité. La théorie de la culture (Benjamin, Debord, Jameson) offre des outils pour mieux comprendre comment ces supércomédies musicales, doublement obsédées par les aspects visuels du spectacle et par le désir de transformer la participation au spectacle en une véritable expérience immersive, devient comme un symbole des fonctions socio-économiques et phénoménologiques du spectacle dans une culture postmoderne –d‟où sans doute le succès immense de ces productions. L‟article démontre aussi que la colonisation de Broadway par ce type de spectacles a une longue histoire. Il relit certains phénomènes qui ont anticipé la manière dont les modes de perception technologiquement médiés de la société du spectacle ont influencé et modifié les pratiques du spectacle à Broadway.
Keywords: Megamusical, Society of the Spectacle, Concept Musical, Hyperspace, Postmodernism
Despite his unprecedented commercial success, composer/ producer Andrew Lloyd Webber has always been the subject of intense critical controversy. In the United Kingdom, where he was born and brought up, the critical response has been
mostly divided, but, in the United States, Lloyd Webber has been subjected to at times savage and humiliating criticism and has been largely dismissed as an opportunist, in spite of his impressive output, the development of a personal aesthetic and the consistency of his success over the years. One of the usual criticisms that Lloyd Webber‟s musicals have attracted is that they offer nothing but spectacle, becoming, thus, the antithesis of the narrative-driven musical play, which was popularized by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II during the Broadway musical‟s so-called “golden” era (1940s-1960s). Rodgers and Hammerstein‟s musicals are still praised by critics and musical-theatre historians for the high level of integration they exhibit, i.e. the synthesis of prose sequences, music and dance into an organic whole, with songs and production numbers contributing to the character and plot development. With their occasionally one-dimensional characters, their elliptical narrative and above all their disproportionate emphasis on the visual aspects of the performance, Lloyd Webber‟s musicals appeared to many critics as being on a mission to systematically tear apart the well made, integrated musical play of the “golden” era.
The aim of this article is to define in aesthetic terms what is derogatorily and summarily dismissed by many critics as spectacle in Lloyd Webber‟s shows and investigate the reasons for its vast popularity in postmodern culture. Evita (1978) is an ideal starting point for such a culturally informed analysis of the spectacular aesthetics of the megamusical - a neologism that has been widely used in order to describe the melodic grandiloquence, the epic subject-matter as well as the grand visual scale on which Lloyd Webber‟s shows are conceived and executed (Sternfeld 1-3). Evita, a musical biography of the (in)famous first lady of Argentina, was Lloyd Webber‟s first blockbuster on Broadway, the first in a series of mammoth hits that would soon transform him into the titan of 42nd street. Moreover, in Evita Lloyd Webber collaborated for the first time with Harold Prince, one of the most innovative musical-theatre directors. In the 1970s, Prince perfected the concept musical that is generally considered by the majority of critics as the most progressive and groundbreaking, almost avant-garde form of musical theatre (McMillin 24). Like the megamusical, it undermines the narrative organization of the musical and foregrounds the visual aspects of the performance. For the staging of Evita, Prince employed and further developed the directorial vocabulary he cultivated in his concept musicals, creating, in the process, the first international megamusical blockbuster. In a sense, Prince can be considered the father of both the concept musical and the megamusical, linking, in this way, two forms of musical theatre: one of the most critically acclaimed with the one that has generally been considered as an anomaly and aberration in the history of the twentieth-century musical theatre. Thus, besides being the ideal starting point for a synchronic analysis of the megamusical, Evita also offers the chance for a diachronic analysis of the relation between the classic Broadway musical and the postmodern megamusical; one that investigates whether the megamusical, with its emphasis on spectacle, constitutes a radical break in the history of twentieth-century musical theatre or it further develops already existing trends.
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Epic Theatre
To a certain extent, Lloyd Webber‟s compositional method, which lends itself very well to visually-driven stagings, must be considered responsible for the megamusical‟s undermining of the more traditionally dramatic organization of the musical play. As a theatre composer, Lloyd Webber does not excel in the meticulous construction of strongly sustained narratives and psychologically developed characters, but rather in the creation of larger-than-life aural images and dramatic highlights, impressive melodic and dramatic statements. For this reason, he is impatient with extended prose sequences, which are used in the musical play for narrative and character exposition and development. Instead, he prefers a pop-friendly “fluid speech-in-music” (Snelson 107), achieved through the recycling of fragments from his main melodic set-pieces that allow him to move swiftly from one musical and dramatic highlight to the next, without sacrificing melodic momentum and delaying the next dramatic high point. Of course, his tendency to fast-forward dramatic action occasionally results in musico-dramatic texts that may appear too fragmentary and elliptical, with telegraphic character and narrative arcs. However, at the same time, these shows present us with a musical theatre that is epic-sized in its representational capabilities.
With its exhaustive representation of a whole era, Evita is one of the most epic-sized musicals ever produced. Listening to the score, one is impressed by the very economic and concise use of the pop song, which often replaces the dramatic scene as the main organizational unit of the musico-dramatic text in order to rapidly cover many incidents or even years of the heroine‟s life. “Goodnight and Thank You” presents Eva whoring her way to the top and conquering show business. As Tim Rice, the show‟s lyricist, points out, “[i]t took Evita quite a few years to make her mark in the big city, but we rushed through this in three and a half minutes” (357). Many other numbers have the exact same effect: “A New Argentina” portrays the Perons manipulating the unions and gradually taking over the country, while the “Rainbow Tour” presents Eva‟s efforts to seduce Spain, Italy and France. Prince, who directed the show both in London and New York, was impressed by the epic scope of the work: “You fellows deal in size and I admire that” (Prince cited in Rice 386), wrote the experienced director to the young composer and lyricist. Most importantly, Prince immediately felt that Evita is less a conventional musical play and more a documentary revue, a collection of incidents and highlights (Ilson 266), trying less to provide an understanding of the central heroine than to capture in snapshot-like manner all the key incidents of her public life.
Indeed, Eva remains a mystery throughout the musical. Apart from her driving ambition and her insatiable narcissism, no other character trait or motivation is provided that could help the audience penetrate the psyche of a woman that provoked adoration and hatred in equal doses. What we get are all the scenes of Eva‟s massive apotheosis by her descamisados (the shirtless people) as well as the hysterical mourning that followed her death; the contempt and the hatred the aristocracy and the military blocks exhibited towards her as well as her communicative power and ability
to manipulate thousands of people; the process of her sanctification by the children as well as her transformation into a Dior-clad, Hollywood-like glam icon and her aestheticization of politics that made her a populist crypto-fascist. What is underplayed is her campaigning for women‟s right to vote and legalization of divorce, the opening up of a thousand new schools, medical centers, clinics, homes for the aged and shelters for the homeless, that earned her the title “the Lady of Hope.” However, Prince was not really bothered by this rather biased representation of Peronist politics. For him, the show was “less about Eva Peron than about the media – what people see on a screen or hear on the radio – We‟re living in a horribly media-oriented era;” thus, he saw Evita as a parable warning against “the perniciousness, the dangers, of media hype, of what packaging and selling can do and how you can sell the public anything if the bands make the right noises and the banners are the right colors and everything‟s set up well” (Prince cited in Ilson 266).
In other words, for Prince Evita was a parable for the rise of what was defined by the Marxist cultural theorist Guy Debord (1994) as “society of the spectacle:” a capitalist society, whose economy is so thoroughly organized around the production and consumption of technologically mediated images that the latter colonize the perceptible world and transform social life into a never-ending audiovisual spectacle. Before Debord, Walter Benjamin had also detected this spectacular reconfiguration of social life that was effected by the advent of capitalism‟s new technological forces (automatic movement and electricity); as well as by the proliferation of advertising images, gigantic billboards, window displays, mannequins, illuminations and palatial department stores that transformed urban space into a phantasmagoric three-dimensional stage, upon which the spectacle of mass consumerism was enacted (Buck-Morss 78-109). The fact that a commercial director would like to reflect on these issues may appear strange, but, in the 1960s and 1970s, Prince unlike most of his peers in commercial theatre was “a politically minded director” (Jones 241), always searching for ways to use the shows he directed to comment on social phenomena. Evita offered him the chance to comment on the twentieth-century phenomenon of the aestheticization of politics, which was symptomatic of the advent of the new spectacular social order that aestheticizes, eroticizes and naturalizes capitalism‟s hegemonic ideologies, institutions and values. Eva‟s glittering nihilism, as depicted in Rice‟s libretto, makes her the ideal exponent of this spectacular social order. She conceives the whole political and media world of Argentina as a huge stage, where she performs her glorified self-perception, seducing and manipulating the thousands and leading her country to economic and spiritual bankruptcy, in order to fulfill her insatiable narcissistic demands.
Prince wanted to capture on stage Eva‟s glamorous superficiality, but also expose its horrifying emptiness. For this reason, his interpretation of the central heroine is totally different from Alan Parker‟s in the 1996 movie version, where Madonna offers a fragile, romanticized version of the character that has nothing in common with the arrogant narcissistic monster of the stage musical. In order to avoid a melodramatic identification of the audience with Eva, Prince adopted a neo-Brechtian directorial vocabulary, characterized by an extremely stylized,
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naturalistic acting and the use of alienating devices, most evident in the way the role of Che was conceived. In the original concept album of the show that was released in 1976, Che, “a nickname in Argentina roughly equivalent to the English „mate‟” (Rice 319), was an Everyman, less a character than an omnipresent narrator. Although nowhere in the album is Che billed as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Rice admits that the Argentinean-born revolutionary was the inspiration for the part. He may have never met Eva but it is probable “that his subsequent career was at least in part influenced by his early life under, and a distaste for, the Peron regime” (319). Prince proposed that on stage Che should be clearly identified with Guevara, complete with beard, beret and fatigues and become the driving force of the show: a sardonic Brechtian narrator, occasionally filled with anger and disgust for everything Eva stands for, the symbol of righteous revolution trying to alienate Eva‟s glamorous fascism.
Apart from Brecht, Prince also borrowed techniques from the political theatre of Erwin Piscator, the director that established the documentary revue and influenced Brecht significantly. The difference between Piscator and Brecht is a subtle one. In Piscator‟s words, “Brecht reveals significant details of social life, while I attempt rather to give a view of political affairs in their totality” (cited in Innes 200). Prince wanted to achieve Piscator‟s “global extension of his stage” (Innes 200) and provide an overview of history, the representation of an epoch in its totality. Film clips were projected on an enormous mobile movie screen in order to communicate the epic feeling, by augmenting and amplifying the events represented on stage. In order to avoid cumbersome set changes that delay and confine the action, Prince replaced the conventional representational sets with abstract, constructivist scenic structures, moving bridges and platforms that enabled the representation of simultaneous and contrasting actions. He created, thus, the sense of a shape-shifting stage area in continuous motion, modified to keep pace with the cataclysmic succession of events. This sense of stage animation was also achieved by a more architectural use of light design, reconfiguring the playing area and providing rapidly shifting optical landscapes, especially through the use of lights embedded in the floor that could flash in various patterns in order to create constantly modified lit spaces for the performers.
Conceptual Staging
This abstract and aggressively pictorial staging betrays the influence of the concept musical, which was, of course, popularized by Prince. According to Martin Gottfried, who coined the term, the concept musical can be defined as a show “based on a stage idea, not a story, but a look, a tone - what the show will be like as a stage animal” (cited in Jones 270-1). What Gottfried‟s definition emphasizes is that the concept musical redefines musical theatre as a predominantly “imagistic medium,” in which the “performance field is rearticulated as a visual field” and the musical performance itself “reflects[s] an essentially scenographic conception” (Garner, Jr. 53-4). This renewed emphasis on the visual aspects of the performance leads to more abstract, unrealistic, non-representational staging, as the director has to free himself/ herself from the confines of scenic verisimilitude in order to explore the visual
dynamics of the stage. Instead of simply staging the prose scenes and supervising the stage traffic, the director now assumes the role of the auteur and reconceives the musical as a total visual composition, a three-dimensional ever-evolving painting, in which the various scenic discourses, set design, light, dance, movement, are combined in new innovative ways in order to create a unique visual effect that encompasses the performance in its totality.
This predominantly pictorial logic, that emphasizes the unique aesthetic form of a stage production, undermines the role of the musical as a narrative medium. The traditional linear-successive organization of the musical numbers and the prose sequences along a narrative line is replaced by an extremely fragmented one, privileging a disruptive and disjunctive editing of the increasingly more imagistic musical sequences. A sense of aesthetic totality is provided not by the linear unfolding of a narrative but by the overarching staging concept, which turns the spectator‟s attention to the overall principle of organization in the same way that an abstract painting does (Bürger 81). This more spatial rather than temporal method of organization is borrowed by the revue, the most ambitious and theatrically accomplished form of variety entertainment. In fact, one of the usual definitions given to the concept musical is “a book show [as the narrative-driven musical is called in musical-theatre jargon] turning into a revue” (Mordden 225). This definition stresses the variety-like, too elliptical, too serial narrative structure of the concept musical: the prose sequences are submerged, trimmed, sometimes eliminated, the connections between the numbers become weak, and so the linear development of the narrative loses its accumulative force. By reducing to the minimum the network of causal connections required by a fully developed plot, the concept musical allows for a more panoramic and pictorially extensive form of dramatic representation that enables the director to stretch the visual capabilities of the theatrical stage into new directions.
With its documentary, revue-like presentation of snapshots from the heroine‟s life, Evita befitted the directorial vocabulary of the concept musical and invited Prince‟s trademark rapid stage editing, not only between the musical numbers, but within individual numbers, which were infused with spatial dynamism and kinetic excitement. Abrupt reversals of perspective, sudden reconfigurations of the stage area, overlapping and contrasting actions and the more choreographed use of light-design enabled him to “cut” rapidly from one image to the next, never permitting the spectator to fully absorb (or get bored with) the represented stage pictures. Apart from using many of the techniques he had already developed in his previous shows, Prince was also given the opportunity to raise his previous experimentations with a more visual kind of musical theatre to a new, more ambitious level, as the epic subject matter invited gigantic stage pictures painted on a vast canvas. Lloyd Webber‟s occasionally grandiose aural settings were translated in musical sequences of overwhelming audiovisual power, like the opening haunting representation of Eva‟s funeral, “Requiem for Evita,” the rousing first-act finale, “A New Argentina,” depicting the effects of Eva‟s propaganda in a way that suggested the Nuremberg rallies (Citron 233), and, of course, the iconic scene of Peron‟s presidential inauguration, where Eva is apotheosized, after she delivers her over-emotional
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oration, “Don‟t Cry for Me Argentina,” in the balcony of the Casa Rosada. Scenes like these exemplified perfectly Prince‟s overall staging concept, i.e. replicating the experience of a massively staged political spectacle, and made Evita something more than a conventional musical show, an intensely synaesthetic experience – especially if we also take into consideration the ingenious use of sound design, hugely amplifying Eva‟s echoing voice in the political rallies and the roaring responses, in order to create the impression of massed thousands and to communicate instantly and physically the power of the Perons‟ demagoguery (Gottfried 86). Compared to Lloyd Webber‟s later blockbusters, Evita is definitely a simpler show, but, its use of multimedia devices, the arena-like effect of the sound design and the constant animation of the stage area managed to communicate an epic, larger-than-life feeling and a sense of spatial extension, which are the trademarks of the megamusical. As Gottfried points out, Prince succeeded in making “a relatively spare production seem immense” (86).
The Postmodern Hyperspace
Immensity, overblown size and monstrous monumentality permeate every aspect of the megamusical, from the epic subject matter and the pseudo-operatic power ballads to the high-budgeted technological special effects. The latter have become an indispensable part of the megamusical and are responsible for the infamous computer-motorized set changes that constitute a unique choreography of imperial grandeur and awe-inducing monumentality: massive architectural kinetic structures, that sometimes extend to and encircle the auditorium, enforce their phenomenological presence, as they move gracefully in and out, float airily up and down, forward and back, participating in their own peculiar performance art. Moreover, technological innovation has become the key for the thorough exploration of the representational dynamics of a progressively rich and complex audio-visual image. As far as the audio component of the image is concerned, the application of automated live consoles, integrated loudspeaker design, MIDI control of processing, hard-disk multi-track playback, digital surround design, level control systems and delay imaging is crucial not only for conventional amplification or for controlling the quality of sound in a live environment; but also for enabling sound to achieve its own framing and generate its own affective landscapes that interact dynamically with the visuals. In the case of the visual component of the image, the use of high-speed and high-intensity light fixtures, color scrollers, digital light curtains, wash luminaires and spot luminaires, dimmers and color mixers enables lighting to acquire a sculptural dimension and expand the totality of space, to potentialize space infinitely, by creating what Gilles Deleuze calls “any-spaces-whatever” (123): deconnected and delocalized spaces, which are the exact opposite of “real milieux of geographical and social actualization;” atmospheric, ethereal and highly absorbent visual spatial abstractions with strong affective tenor (108-11).
To put it simply, the megamusical aspires to be a feast for both the eyes and the ears. The audience is not so much invited to identify emotionally with characters or think; they are primarily invited to hear and see: to re-educate their liberated sense
organs and learn to indulge in purely aural and optical situations; to feel the sound in their guts and be absorbed by the visuals. Thus, the spectators cease to be onlookers, observers of the action and are swallowed up in it, devoured by the spectacle itself. This sense of “bewildering immersion” (Jameson 43) transforms theatrical space into hyperspace: an immense affective encompasser, that redefines the viewing experience as a hyper-charged thrill-ride, an exploration of new and challenging aural and visual sensations. The term hyperspace derives from Fredric Jameson and is used in order to describe a space that transcends the perceptual equipment of the individual human body, by generating a feeling of infinite sensory extension and unlimited affective potential. The hyperspatial anamorphosis of the theatrical environment must be seen as part of a larger process of hyperspatialization, which, for Jameson, is one of the defining characteristics of postmodern culture. Hotels, airports, restaurants, clubs and even the centre of the city itself aspire to be total worlds, dreamlike, hallucinatory universes of affective plenitude, that embody the utopian prospect of “expand[ing] our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” (39). With the advent of large-scale architectural surfaces that animate solid space with their ever-changing imagery, the hyperspatial reconfiguration of public space makes the distinction between spectacle and spectator, fantasy and reality, art and life an obsolete one as social life itself approaches the form of “total theatre” (Baudrillard 71). One of the most famous areas that have recently succumbed to this process of high-tech hyperspatialization is, of course, 42nd street, which has been transformed into one more hypermediated brandscape, like the ones proliferating in other late-capitalist media cities, like Las Vegas and Tokyo, becoming, thus, a tourist attraction and a megaspectacle in itself, quite similar to the ones that are staged inside the theatres.
This high-tech spectacularization of public space is the latest stage in a century-long process of colonization of social life by technologically mediated spectacle, which is now transformed from an object of contemplation into a lived experience. With their incorporation of cutting-edge digital technology, their almost obsessive concentration on the visual aspects of the performance and their transformation of spectatorship into an overwhelming immersive experience, megamusicals become emblematic of this latest mutation in the role of spectacle as a socio-economic, cultural, phenomenological and existential category – a fact that explains their immense commercial success. Moreover, if the technological invasion of everyday life and its saturation with images is a long process that has intensified over the years, as cultural theory, from Benjamin to Debord and Jameson, indicates, then, the current colonization of Broadway by spectacle must have a long history. In other words, we must be able to trace anticipatory tendencies, which reflect how a spectacular society‟s new modes of technologically mediated perception have gradually modified and shaped Broadway‟s aesthetic production.
For example, in the early twentieth century, the fragmentation of stage action into rapidly changing scenes creating a panoramic effect, the emergence of highly fragmented forms of variety entertainment and the experimentations with stage montage must be seen as responses to the acceleration of everyday life and the more
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kaleidoscopic perceptual habits brought about by automatic movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the reign of the musical play, the predilection of the choreographer-directors (Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion) for extensive and occasionally over-indulgent production numbers which explore texture, color, rhythm and movement betrays a fascination with the surface qualities of the stage image that is only possible in a society so saturated with images that “the promise of rich sight” or “sight itself as richness” can gradually become “the ground for extensive experience” (Dana Polan cited in Mulvey 12). With the more aggressively pictorial dramaturgy of conceptual directors and their systematic undermining of linear narration in favor of a more spatial organization, the whole musical seems to be transformed into a huge production number, in which set design and lighting are liberated by their relative immobility and become interactive components of an increasingly complex visual stage action. In this way, the concept musical seems to be one breath away from the megamusical, because the latter does nothing more than using a sophisticated stage technology in order to further radicalize the imagistic potential of musical theatre.
From the Concept Musical to the Megamusical
However, there is one crucial difference between the concept musical and the megamusical. Reaching its artistic peak just before the digital explosion, the concept musical is the product of a culture permeated by spectacle, but still able to come to terms, reflect on and even criticize the processes of spectacularization, aestheticization and theatricalization of social life. In other words, the concept musical‟s disproportional concentration on the visual aspects of the performance goes hand in hand with representational ends, an obligation to represent, however obliquely, the external world. In Prince and Stephen Sondheim‟s seminal first collaboration, Company (1970), urban space is represented as a chaotic hyperspace, “one enormous cubist painting” (Boris Aronson cited in Ilson 166), an abstract urban jungle, in which the disconnected rituals from everyday life are derealized, denaturalized and acquire an effect of absurdity, a ghostly, dreamlike unreality. Similarly, in their next collaboration, Follies (1971), the virtual and the actual, the imaginary and the real merge in a collective nervous breakdown, staged as a paranoiac Ziegfeldean extravaganza, in which middle-aged ex-stars and ex-chorus girls of the revue are forced to face their idealized reflections from the past, acting in a symbolic way as the entertainment myths of a romanticized, more innocent America. In Chicago (1975), directed by Fosse, life is transformed into a grotesque vaudeville ritual, in which the mythologized images of America‟s most favorite musical-theatre stars are the masks that the characters wear, the roles they perform, in order to hide their corruption. Finally, in A Chorus Line (1975), directed by Michael Bennett, one‟s whole existence is validated only through performance, as life is a continuous auditioning process and the world is a stage: an extremely minimalist black box with descending mirrors, a void suddenly illuminated by a spotlight, providing you the chance to shine for just a moment. The absurdity of Company, the
psychopathology of Follies, the cynicism of Chicago and the subtle sense of irony of
A Chorus Line indicate an anxiety over the advent of a social order that privileges
fantasy over reality, performance over identity and virtuality over actuality; this anxiety creates an urge to represent and comment on these new realities.
With the advent of the megamusical, we finally move to a more playful and properly postmodern logic, which tries to avoid representational obligations and anxieties. There is a well-known story about Cats (1981), the musical that heralded the dawning of a new postmodern musical era, encapsulating the major difference between the concept musical and the megamusical. In the early stages of its development, before the arrival of director Trevor Nunn, Lloyd Webber hoped that Prince would direct the show. However, when Lloyd Webber pitched him the idea, Prince could not get it. He “listened attentively and then asked, „Is it a metaphor? Is one of these cats Disraeli? Gladstone? Queen Victoria? Is this about British politics?‟ Lloyd Webber laughed. „Hal,‟ he said, „it's about cats!‟” (Richmond 73). What Prince could not understand is that the musical‟s artistic means would be devoid of representational ends and the whole show would not reflect and comment on the world, even in an oblique, metaphorical way, but would be committed to the construction of a totally fantastical topography: the universe of anthropomorphic felines that inhabit a sci-fi “waste land,” move in a combination of animal movement, acrobatics and various dancing styles, sing a vast array of musical pastiches and speak in a distinctively Victorian and Edwardian language, which contrasts in a playfully dissonant way with their ghetto-fabulous corporeal stylization (leg-warmers, arm-warmers, punk haircuts, new-wave make-up). All these collage effects make Cats a proper postmodern text, “a woven fabric” of “quotations without inverted commas,” which does not try to articulate a specific message, but rather functions as “a system with neither close nor centre,” the locus of infinite play (Barthes 159-60).
Compared to Cats and Lloyd Webber‟s subsequent blockbusters, like Starlight
Express (1984) and The Phantom of the Opera (1986), as well as the Disney
productions, which dominated Broadway and the international megamusical circuit after his demise, Evita is an edgier, adult and socially-aware musical. Its social relevance derives mainly from Rice‟s fascination with “the society of the spectacle,” and, more specifically, with Warholian superstardom and the rise of celebrity culture. From the more playful treatment of these themes in Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), Rice offered in Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) a
daring metaphoric representation of Jesus Christ as a contemporary celebrity guru or rock god, a mass media showstopper, glorified, deified and crucified by a civilization desperate but unable to transcend its superficial material existence; while, in Evita, he created an evil Cinderella story, reflecting metaphorically on the blatant materialism, glittering nihilism and megalomaniac narcissism of our late-capitalist cultures. Moreover, by downplaying the obvious camp elements of the story and sharpening the political focus of the whole show, Prince created a piece of musical theatre that balanced very carefully between the traditional Broadway razzle-dazzle and the post-1960s political awareness, between mass-cultural conventions and artistic innovations. Thus, in spite of the operatic subject matter, the melodic grandness and
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the epic-sized staging, Evita is not yet a megamusical in its finished form, like Cats. It is still embedded in a climate of social critique, and, for this reason, is much closer in tone and atmosphere to the concept musicals of the 1970s than the high-tech extravaganzas of the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, by watching Cats you just knew “you were in the future” (as Warhol said when he first realized the explosion of a postmodern pop culture); Evita‟s socio-political relevance was gone, “but the amazement was just starting” (Warhol cited in Cagle 1995: 63).
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Vagelis Siropoulos received his BA, MA and PhD from the School of English of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His publications and research interests center on the Marxist-historicist analysis of culture and aesthetic/ literary texts, with particular emphasis on the historicization of the ideological boundaries between high and mass culture as well as the erosion of such boundaries in postmodern culture. His PhD thesis offers a synchronic and diachronic culturally informed analysis of megamusical aesthetics and analyzes the cultural logic behind the British musical theatre‟s appropriation of a representational logic that derives from elitist, avant-garde forms of postdramatic theatrical performance. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Drama Department of Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. His interest in musical theatre extends beyond the theoretical domain. He has conceived and directed many musical performances for the Theatre Group of Aristotle University and presented his work in The Netherlands and Germany. In 2009, he produced and directed his first professional musical performance, Boîte Électrique, in Athens.
