It’s a brand new week on the London Palladium theater, the place the Evita forged is collectively shaking off a bug. “We have been actually limping throughout the end line this previous week,” says James Olivas, who performs main man Juan Perón. “We had each swing on and folks doing cut up tracks, which we’ve by no means carried out earlier than, simply to get the present up and operating. Everybody’s extremely proficient, so it labored out.”
To his level, the chaos was not in any method apparent to their viewers. Critiques of Jamie Lloyd’s West Finish revival of Evita, the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice that first got here to the stage in 1978, have highlighted the forged’s chemistry and kinetic vitality. It’s a contemporary and adrenaline-spiking retelling of Argentina’s most well-known first girl’s story—performed by Rachel Zegler—with huge rock numbers and Beyoncé-esque hair flips, slaloming by means of populist politics and movie star worship. Reverse Zegler is Olivas, a stoic, sinister Perón—and, at 28, an unusually younger actor for the function.
After we converse, simply earlier than name time and warm-ups, Olivas is a beaming, jokey antipode to his character. Diego Andres Rodriguez, who performs Che, waves within the background of our Zoom. (Rodriguez and Olivas share an house block in Camden, and a dressing room deep within the Palladium annals.) It’s each of their first occasions within the UK. “Day by day off, we discover as a lot as we are able to,” says Olivas. They tried to pitch a visit to Brighton Satisfaction to see headliner Mariah Carey, however couldn’t make it work; as an alternative, they went for a Sunday roast on the Greyhound, walked round Kew Gardens, and had drinks in Richmond on the Thames. All of the textbook vacationer stuff was ticked off weeks into rehearsals.
Olivas grew up in Houston, Texas, earlier than transferring to Los Angeles for college and faculty. His deal with soccer, basketball, and water polo—and plans to finally comply with in his father’s footsteps to change into a mechanical engineer—shifted after a knee harm, and being uncovered to theater in LA. (Consistently listening to him sing within the bathe finally pushed his mother to push him right into a group manufacturing of Ragtime.) “From then I did as a lot as I may,” Olivas says. “However I believed it was one thing I might do on the weekends exterior of my dependable, regular, nine-to-five job.” His time in conservative Texas had additionally left him with “loads of unlearning to do about what I could possibly be.”
“In faculty, I ended and thought, It’s theater or engineering. I took a leap of religion. So right here we’re, on the West Finish.”