EVITA
Evita is a musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice. It concentrates on the life of Argentine political leader Eva Perón, the second wife of Argentine president Juan Perón. The story follows Evita’s early life, rise to power, charity work, and eventual death. The musical began as a rock opera concept album released in 1976. Its success led to productions in London’s West End in 1978, winning the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical, and on Broadway a year later, where it was the first British musical to receive the Tony Award for Best Musical. (More from Wikipedia)
In 1978, Chris Spedding was a key musician in one of the most ambitious concept albums of all time (and the best selling British concert/cast album ever), Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. Actor Richard Burton handled the narration, and the musicians are a virtual Who’s Who of the British rock scene of that era: Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, bass guitarist Herbie Flowers (that’s him playing the prominent bass line on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”), David Essex (“Rock On”), and actress/vocalist Julie Covington; she and Essex had been appearing together in early performances of the rock musical Evita. The album tells the story pretty much as The War of the Worlds was written by H. G. Wells (much of Burton’s narration is word-for-word from the novel) decades before Steven Spielberg’s film basically did the same; I consider War of the Worlds to be one of Spielberg’s best movies and certainly his most disturbing.
(November 2011)
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Chimera recorded something like 20 songs (variously reported as being in 1968, 1969 and/or 1970) in an acid-folk style for a planned album that remained unreleased for decades, while picking up legendary status among psychedelic record collectors. Amazingly, only cassettes remain from the recording sessions, though the sound quality is not at all impaired; they were remastered beautifully by Denis Blackham, an industry legend who had previously mastered the music for the Evita and Cats musicals and also albums by Led Zeppelin, Madness, Eurythmics, and Brian Eno.
(November 2013)
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The next Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Evita – my personal favorite among the Webber shows – started out as a rock opera album that was released in 1975. In a novel move, the narrator of the story of Eva “Evita” Perón, the wife of Argentine dictator Juan Perón, is famed South American and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara (identified only as “Che” initially). Mandy Patinkin launched his career with his Tony-winning role as Che on Broadway; on the original Evita album and in earlier productions, Che is played by Colm Wilkinson, who later became world famous in originating the role of Jean Valjean in the 1985 West End (London) and Broadway musical Les Misèrables.
(September 2016)
