Evita

When I was twelve, I was gripped by the musical Evita. I don’t know how I came to first hear it, because that year would have been the opening year. Maybe my mother, a musical theatre buff, had purchased the record first and I appropriated it for my own. I can’t say now. But there was The Record, which I played on the big downstairs stereo at window-rattling decibels. And sometime later, a cassette tape which I bought doing extra chores around the house. The tape stayed in the car. And on trips and errands, I leaned up through the gap in the front seats to thumb it back in its little slot as soon as we were in the car.

Why those songs and those voices gripped me so, I’m not sure.  But I knew that it was powerful. That a song could be a proclamation or a lament. That with a pause here and a twist of voice, an actor could mock… and a few beats later, with a pause and a rising tone, could cajole. The politics of Evita, I didn’t understand.  I’m not even sure that I understood in any real way the words I belted out. I understood the tone and the rising and falling notes, the emotion of the pieces. That Peron was evil in a banal way, that Che wanted to love Evita, but hated her.  And wanted to hate her, but loved her. That Evita herself was both astute and delusional.

For my birthday, my parents bought tickets to see Evita at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA.  We dressed up in church clothes. I worried about what to wear, what could I sit in, what would I want Evita to see me in. Full-blown fashion crisis, as my mother called it. At last something was resolved and an outfit was chosen. It was probably done by default, the thing I had on when Dad called “the bus is pulling out!”  rather than by active choice.

I can’t remember the drive to the city, just being in the backseat belted in, watching the freeway billboards and building roofs zoom by in the frame of my window. The cassette played Patti Lupone’s sobbing voice apologizing, rationalizing, Mandy Patinkin’s hurt sarcastic Che, and Magaldi’s sly, oily song.

I don’t remember parking or walking to the theatre. My head was full of the song of the excitement of the grown-up-ness of Going To The Theater.  Of being dressed up and being in the City. When I strain, in my mind’s eye, but with blurred edges, I can see the mirrored sweep of the building. Up and up it went, with banners hanging down. Inside the flow of the stairs dragging your eyes again, up and up. And the radiance of it all. More solidly, I can remember understanding the sanctity of the building. It was a cathedral, a sacred space, as much as any other building I’d seen in my short life.

In the dim hall, we found our places. The seats were properly bouncy and properly red velvet. The stage was hidden by a thick fall of curtain. The lights directed the eye toward the ceiling. I followed the light across the ceiling and around the room, turning in my seat to see what was behind, leaning forward to see what was in front, below our balcony seats. The assembly murmured and the weight of the mass of hushed commentary, the whisper of coats coming off, of slick program pages being turned, filled the room.

As the lights dimmed, we quieted. The room hummed with an excitement. I could feel it in my body too, a restless electric anticipation that built as the house lights moved from twilight to full night and the curtain puffed once and then once again as latecomers hurried to their seats. Then as one, by what signal I do not know, we were still, and in that deafening, anticipatory silence, the curtains rose.