Stars make ‘Evita’ roles their own
Broadway tours rarely sport the same kind of star power as the New York productions they recreate, but in the case of “Evita,” that’s probably a good thing.
In last year’s revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, the big draw was pop singer Ricky Martin as Ché, the everyman narrator who tells the story of Argentine icon Eva Perón. Best known for his hit “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” Martin was affable enough but hardly riveting, and his voice virtually evaporated in the presence of his stage-tested co-stars.
For the revival’s first national tour, which visits ASU Gammage on Tuesday through Sunday, Dec. 3-8, Martin’s replacement is upand-comer Josh Young. He made his Broadway debut last year as Judas in “Jesus Christ Superstar” and scored a Tony Award nomination. And this isn’t his first outing as Ché, a part he first essayed at the prestigious Stratford Festival in Canada.
For Young, the challenge isn’t replacing Martin but filling the shoes of Mandy Patinkin, who originated the role on Broadway in 1979 opposite Patti LuPone.
“It’s OK to be informed by other people’s work as long as we’re not trying to copy them,” Young says. “When I first approached the role, I was doing it the same way Patinkin did, in terms of it was Ché as Ché Guevara. But this time I think I’ve gotten all of the Patinkinisms out of my system, because the role is so different the way we’re doing it.”
The association of the character with Guevara, the berettopped Marxist revolutionary and T-shirt emblem, is natural enough, but as Young explains, it wasn’t what Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice had in mind.
“Ché in Spanish means ‘Hey, buddy,’ ” he says. “So he’s just a guy, one of the people, one of the descamisados or the ‘shirtless ones,’ as they refer to them. They’re not literally shirtless, they’re the people who rolled up their sleeves and worked, fought for the workers.
“When Ricky was doing it on Broadway, he wore a white shirt and stood out from the crowd. But we have me in the same clothing as the rest of the crowd, because