Evita is a stunning, exhilarating theatrical experience, especially if you don't think about it too much….

[It is] a virtually faultless piece of Broadway fantasy that has shadow exultantly victorious over substance, and form virtually laughing at content.

First let me stress that this pop-opera … is wonderfully entertaining in everything but the aftertaste of its pretensions. But don't cry for [Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice] anyone—this deserves to be a sizeable hit….

This is a more vital attempt at pop-opera than was the author's previous Jesus Christ Superstar. Rice has constructed his libretto with coherence and his deliberately abrasive lyrics generally achieve just the right slogan-like simplicity…. [Lloyd Webber's score] has a bull-dozing charm and the memorability of the already half-remembered.

The fault of the whole construction is that it is hollow. We are expected to deplore Evita's morals but adore her circuses. We are asked to accept a serious person onstage, of a complexity Hammerstein would never have even murmured to Rodgers, and yet the treatment of that person is essentially superficial, almost trivial. The gloss of the surface is meant to be impenetrable—and it is.

But what a gloss!…

You must see Evita. For all the disappointments of its undelivered promises and eroded aspirations, it is a definite marker-point in the ongoing story of the Broadway musical.