Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice of, first, the pop-rock musical Jesus Christ, Superstar and, now, Evita are a couple of pop-art geniuses; what they lack is talent….

[Eva Peron's life] is certainly the stuff of opera, and opera is just what our heroes have propsed: great sumptuous orchestrations played by the London Philharmonic, funny off-key recitatives, Menotti-modern-opera scenes, choral madrigals, frenzied chants, and Latin lamentations, as well as heavy-beat rock music, much of it with a greasy sort of Latin overlay.

But is all this panoply mere show without substance? So it seems; one looks in vain for content. In the case of Superstar, Webber and Rice had some familiar dramatic material to work with. Here they need to sort it out themselves, and they don't. Politics gets short shrift, and so they miss out on the great background story of how a populist, working-people's movement becomes a fascist dictatorship with a sex symbol to sugarcoat the pill. There's no more than the minimum social background….

The attitude toward the characters is ambiguous. Peron is a stooge and has virtually nothing to sing. The real male lead is someone ominously named "Ché" who seems to be more interested in pushing the new insecticide he's developed than in helping tell Eva's story. Whatever the intent, this character bears no resemblance to Ché Guevara … and he has no relevance to the plot. He is not even an effective commentator but really just a device to get on with the story. Eva herself is hardly dramatized at all; she is a puppet and, strangely, not at all likable. Even her big emotional addresses to the people of Argentina, set over and over again to the same music, are like a prostitute's bag of faked emotional tricks. Dramatization requires characters, conflict, discoveries, mysteries, comedies, tragedies, surprises, knowns, unknowns, ironies, loves, hates, sympathies, deceits—all of which our authors forgot or didn't know how to supply. And an opera (or music theater or lyric theater or whatever) must develop these motifs musically, not only expressing ideas and emotions but also carrying events on its musical back.

Perhaps one should forget about all this—after all, Evita is just a recording at this point, not a dramatic presentation—and concentrate on words and music. Both are great lumpy concoctions of clichés, awkwardnesses, and ripped-off ideas (would you believe Swan Lake and Both Sides Now?) leavened with flashes of brilliance. Now and again parts congeal into bouncy, cynical, outrageous, campy Latin-rock or folk-rock numbers. The focus of the whole is Eva's speech to the crowd at Peron's inauguration. This song or aria,… actually moving in a counterfeit sort of way, is based entirely on a couple of dumb emotional tunes that are repeated over and over again (before, during, and after) so that they burn their way into your brain.

Up to the end of Part I we are carried along on the impetus of Eva's rise to power, set as a series of strokes of high banality and low camp. But once she has arrived, there is nowhere to go, musically or dramatically. Everything grinds to a halt. Part II is full of draggy, bad modern-opera-isms and fake Caribbean tunes along with endless repetitions of music from Part I, some of it pasted up in mawkish, awkward collage. In the end, we cannot untangle the dramatic, verbal, and musical skeins, and, indeed, the authors' ambitions do not permit us to do so. When the dramatic form crumbles, the musical ebullience and the flashes of brilliance flicker out too.