Evita, Phoenix Theatre, London, review: sharply underlines the ambivalence of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical

Emma Hatton is a wonderfully compelling Evita in this robust staging of Tim Rice's classic

(Pamela Raith Photography)

I missed this acclaimed touring production, directed by Bob Thomson and Bill Kenwright, when it came in to the refurbished Dominion three years ago. It's good to make its acquaintance now in a version that has returned to the West End for a limited three-month run at the Phoenix Theatre.

The staging is remarkably robust and sharp, with an edge and an operatic sweep that do handsome justice to this last (and probably best) collaboration between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Fluent and full of fraught energy, it underlines the ambivalence of this 1978 musical towards its subject. Were the authors really training a critical eye on the decline of politics into show business and on the cult of celebrity? Or were they cashing in on it? Or both? From the outset, Evita has been accused of glamorising fascism. But this production rightly makes you feel a queasy equivocality towards Eva Peron and mixed feelings about Che, the alter ego figure who stalks the show offering a bitter ironic commentary on it.

Both characters are very well cast here. Charting the anti-heroine's progress from trashy opportunist to Juan Peron's first lady to folk saint in Argentina, Emma Hatton is wonderfully compelling. She a whirlwind of tawdry ambition as she commandeers a gender-reversed casting couch to advance her cause (routinely dropping his luggage from her balcony onto the head of the latest reject), and Hatton convincingly retains that streak of coarseness as the character gets blonder and blonder and becomes increasingly indispensable to the President.

Handy for portraying the disingenuous emotions of a demagogue, her voice has an extraordinary dynamic range, dropping to a manipulative soft liquid loveliness for the balcony rendition of “Don't Cry For Me Argentina”. She's feisty and funny marching through songs like “Rainbow High” where she has wardrobe fitting for her grand tour of Europe in 1947 (“I came from the people/They need to adore me/So Christian Dior me/From my head to my toes”), and in her later scenes with Peron – an impressively controlled Kevin Stephen-Jones – she's very moving as she registers the nearness of death. She summons up direct echoes of the show's most famous song song in Eva's renunciatory “Final Broadcast” – perhaps a calculated, damage-limiting gesture.

The danger with Che is that an actor will perform this commentator-figure on one note. That is happily not the case here. Gian Marco Schiaretti is a handsome, sardonic presence with a light, attractively insinuating voice and he finds a range of tones which which to express Che's discontent and disappointment with Eva. The character has to hold the show together and Schiaterri pulls this off with his bitter brio, excelling in numbers such as “And the Money Keeps Rolling In (And Out)” about Eva's crooked Foundation and its laundering activities. Bill Deamer's choreography is witty and steamy (I loved the attempts at a refined way of wriggling by the snooty upper-class ladies who spurned Eva) and overall the production is a treat for fans and newcomers alike.

'Evita' is at the Phoenix Theatre until 14 October