Skylight Music Theatre Announces Cast and Creative Team For EVITA

Skylight Music Theatre today announced the cast and creative team for the staged concert version of Evita, running March 20-29, 2020 in Skylight's beautiful Cabot Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center, 158 N. Broadway, in Milwaukee's Historic Third Ward.

This staged concert version is a special 10-performance limited run of the seven-time Tony Award-winning megawatt musical. Instead of a fully staged production, this presentation focuses on the powerful music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Tim Rice and the passionate performances by the 13 singers and nine-piece orchestra. Compelling moments in the story will be staged to ignite the audience's imagination about Eva Perón's captivating life. It will be presented with minimal staging and limited costumes.

The story of Evita follows Eva Duarte and her meteoric rise from impoverished child to wife of Argentine president Juan Perón and, finally, to becoming the most powerful woman in Latin America.

Michelle Lopez-Rios will make her Skylight debut as director of Evita. Formerly the head of the BFA Acting program at UW-Milwaukee, Lopez-Rios now serves as Artistic Director of Chicago Playworks at The Theatre School at DePaul, where she is also a faculty member.

"The story of Eva Perón is fascinating," said Lopez-Rios. "She was so loved, so hated and ultimately achieved a reputation as the most powerful woman in the contemporary world. With music as complex as the subject, the musical employs many styles including classical, tango, ballads and rock. How lucky am I to spend time with some of Milwaukee's finest artists to dig into a piece of history and the enigma that is Evita."

Evita began as a rock opera concept album released in 1976 with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics and book by Tim Rice. 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. Followed by a series of professional tours and worldwide productions, a film adaptation of Evita was released in 1996 featuring Madonna as the title role. This is the first time Evita has been produced at Skylight.

"I think it is a perfect time for Skylight to be doing their first Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical," said Artistic Director Michael Unger. "It is one of the first, great 'British Invasion' musicals. By focusing less on the production elements in this concert version, we can experience Webber and Rice's amazing music and words on a very personal level - thereby establishing a pure and direct connection between material and audience. The score is an artful fusion of many styles in this musical based on the rags-to-Argentinian-first-lady story of Maria Eva Duarte de Perón."

In 1980, Evita won a total of seven Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for Patti LuPone. Evita also won six Drama Desk Awards in 1980 including Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Lyrics and Outstanding Music. The show is recommended for ages 12 and up.

Wall Street Journal said Evita was "an impressive achievement" and NY Daily News called it "a great big touch of star quality." Chicago Tribune called it "[an] audacious, thrilling musical" and Variety called it "dynamic." Daily Mirror called it "a total triumph. A technical knockout, a magnificent earful, a visual triumph and a wow."

EVITA CREATIVE TEAM

Director - Michelle Lopez-Rios

Music Director - Kerry Bieneman

Choreographer - Alicia Rice

Costume Designer - Kristina Sneshkoff

Sound Designer - Sun Hee Kil

EVITA CAST

Eva Perón - Rána Roman*

Perón - Andrew Varela*

Che - Kevin Melendez*

Perón's Mistress - Ashley Rodriguez

Magaldi - Doug Clemons

Young Performers - Taylor Arnstein, Olivia Vitrano

Ensemble

Elizabeth Bivens-Logan, Cecilia Davis, Lydia Eiche, Jeremy Mossman, Adam Qutaishat, Shayne Steliga

*Denotes member of Actors' Equity Association

For more information visit www.skylightmusictheatre.org or email info@skylightmusictheatre.org.

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