In the new Evita at the London Palladium, Rachel Zegler sings from the theatre’s actual balcony – meaning the big-paying audience doesn’t experience what passersby get for free. Could this gimmick catch on?
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n the theatrical tactic “breaking the fourth wall”, characters acknowledge the presence of the audience. As when, in the current National Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, Here We Are, the performers, walking forward, stop in shock at seeing a big room full of strangers.
The director Jamie Lloyd, though, is pioneering a technique that might be called breaking the theatre wall. In his revival of Evita, previewing at the London Palladium, Rachel Zegler’s Eva Perón sings Don’t Cry For Me Argentina – supposedly delivered from the Casa Rosada presidential balcony in Buenos Aires – from the balcony outside the Palladium, while the audience inside has to settle for a video feed.
Last year, at London’s Savoy theatre, Lloyd staged the title number of another Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Sunset Boulevard, with Tom Francis delivering the song while walking up the stairs from his dressing room out on to the Strand and then back down into the theatre, all filmed by a backwards-moving camera operator capturing live images shown on a screen to theatregoers. Since the Olivier-winning production became Tony winning on Broadway, Francis has been doing a version of the route in and out of the St James theatre along West 44th Street.
