There's an eerily prophetic line close to the very opening of "Evita," the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that chooses to sing about the brief, bizarre life of Eva Perón and her joint rule of Argentina with her dictator-husband, Juan. The evening opens with the announcement of her death at 33….

The lady's coffin is not yet closed, though. That will be done by Che himself, slapping the great lid shut and sending clouds of dust flying into the bleak, steelwork sky. He then sings the couplet that is going to prove both accurate and, to the entertainment, damaging: "As soon as the smoke from the funeral clears / We're all gonna see she did nothing for years."

That is precisely the problem confronting director Harold Prince and the onetime authors of "Jesus Christ Superstar." As they have charted out the enterprise, Evita is going to use a sleek-haired tango singer to make her way to the big city, she's going to dump him for a succession of more and more important lovers, she's going to snare the mighty man who's about to win Argentina's lethal game of musical chairs, she's going to pose as a friend of the poor while accumulating an impressive supply of furs and diamond-studded gowns, she's going to be called a whore before she's through, and her body's due to waste away as cancer strikes her early.

Yet we almost never see any of these things happen dramatically onstage. We hear about them at second-hand, mainly from the omnipresent Che…. Whenever Che is briefly silent, we are getting the news from lyrics or recitative sung by top-hatted aristocrats, breathless messengers, almost anyone at hand. It is rather like reading endless footnotes from which the text has disappeared, and it puts us into the kind of emotional limbo we inhabit when we're just back from the dentist but the novocaine hasn't worn off yet.

To be fair, there are at least two passages in which we are really present at a key confrontation. The first occurs when Evita strides peremptorily into Perón's bedroom to dispossess the schoolgirl mistress in residence. "I've just unemployed you," she snaps to the youngster as she snatches her suitcase from beneath the bed and swiftly packs it. It's probably because two people have settled something face-to-face that we are so taken with the melodic plaint that follows ("Another Suitcase in Another Hall")….

And, near the second act's end, there is a genuine personal clash between Evita and Perón, both pacing from one bedroom to another, she determined on being named Vice President, he bluntly pointing out that her glitter is gone and what's left will soon be ashes. If we ever begin, however remotely, to feel something for this no-holds-barred opportunist, it is as she crumples to the floor still insisting that half the power is hers. The contest between approaching death and a stubborn will stirs a faint twinge in us, I think, because it's been acted out, fought harshly before our eyes.

Otherwise we are condemned to hearing what we want to know—need to know, if we're to offer any kind of response—relayed to us by a narrator. The use of Che Guevara for the purpose seems to me approximately as opportunist as Evita's own manipulations. Not because, factually, he wasn't there at the time, had nothing whatever to do with the Peróns. But because he is most often employed to make certain that we won't go developing a crush on Evita ourselves….

In effect, this keeps us permanently outside the action, unable to decipher Evita's complexities for ourselves. We ask ourselves, in vain, how this dubious and remote heroine managed to get close enough to Perón to work her will on him, what it was she did to endear herself to a gullible population. Because vital scenes are simply absent, there are no conclusions, no judgments, we can arrive at on our own. They've all been handed down, hammered down, from the outset. We're not participants, we're recipients of postal cards (and photographs) from all over. Which is a chilly and left-handed way to write a character-musical. (p. 149)

[One goes] home wondering why the authors chose to write a musical about materials they were then going to develop so remotely, so thinly. (p. 150)