Evita Perón's shadow is long. The second wife of the Argentine leader Juan Domingo Perón came from humble origins and became a goddess for the poor with her foundation and her works of charity. To finish becoming a myth, the patroness of the descamisados died very young, of cancer, at the age of 33. The legend grew even bigger when her life became the subject of a rock opera, Evita, with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which premiered in the late 1970s, and in 1996 came the film version, starring Madonna.
But if the shadow of María Eva Duarte de Perón is long, the connections with Barcelona make it even more surprising. When the colonel's wife traveled to Barcelona in 1947, she left a double mark. On the one hand, the neighborhood of barracks that had just been created at one end of Verneda, in Sant Martí de Provençals, took its name, La Perona, following the visit he made there. On the other hand, the route of covert international aid to Franco's Spain that was established through Argentina caused ships to arrive in the Peninsula carrying a variant of tender bean that, in honor of the popular leader, was baptized as perona. The huts no longer exist, but we continue to eat tender beans of the perona variety.
Here, then, is this double Barcelona connection, which is now becoming a "perona mass" to close the present edition of the Greek Festival in Barcelona. For two nights, on July 27 and 28, the Montjuïc amphitheater will become a secular temple in honor and glory of Evita, with the show hosted by Jordi Prat i Coll, For Evita. A musical astracanada.
There will be some songs from the musical in the Catalan version, but also a medley by Raffaella Carrà, Verdaguer i Poveda, Núria Feliu i Sondheim, Whitney Houston and Paloma San Basilio, "to understand Evita in Spain", points out Prat i Coll. "I'm fascinated by her populism, dressed in Christian Dior with a convertible, throwing money at the poor. I thought that American politics would copy the European one, and now it's happening the other way around." On stage, four protagonists: Ivan Labanda, Anna Moliner, Jordi Vidal and Andreu Gallén, who is also the musical director, and who already premiered a first version in 2016 at Temporada Alta, with the title Requiem for Evita.
But now it is not a small-format musical, but the show that closes the Grec, therefore, the production has been greatly rethought. "We came from Requiem for Evita and now we have expanded it, with one more protagonist, Ivan - explains Prat i Coll-. We have added eight dancers, the peronetes, who are schoolgirls doing their little things; seven musicians, and a choir from Milan and Fontanals, the Musicals' Choir". Everything has a very casual tone: "The performers are called by their first names, because we also play on this confusion. And the whole thing is a musical astrakhanada, because we have to be happy and we have to be able to do what we want in the theater to have a good time".
Prat i Coll changed the title and chose astracanada because, according to the DIEC, it is a "comic theatrical piece characterized by a disorganized action", which is the intention of the piece. But Anna Moliner qualifies: "Jordi talks a lot about Astrakhan, but he also talks about faith. And our faith is theater and culture, which is what gives us a raison d'etre."
Prat i Coll has been inspired by the world of Parallel and Las Vegas, because it is "show business by the sideburns". "It is also a tribute to the television of the eighties and nineties - he continues -, of the Mamachichos and the Carrà. There is something from Molino in the show. They have a text, but then they do whatever they want. They have this freedom because they know what the record is", he concludes.
