Do you know, I’ve only ever been to one Andrew
Lloyd Webber musical? And that’s because someone gave me a ticket. I went to
see Starlight Express at the Apollo Victoria theatre. It was rubbish.
This week, however,
Evita is in town, and I thought I’d give him (Lloyd
Webber, that is) another chance. We scored some tickets for the
Saturday matinee performance. We went for a quick lunch at
Egmont St Eatery, a new-ish café
on (you guessed it) Egmont St. This café had recently taken the award for “best
burger” at this year’s
Burger Wellington competition – I’d even eaten the
burger in question during
Wellington On A Plate – so I was looking forward to
trying it again. I asked the waitress if this was the same award-winning
burger, and she told us it was its “little brother”. It was, to coin a phrase,
a tasty burger. It had everything you want in a burger, and nothing you didn’t.
In the spirit of Burger Wellington, I washed it down with a
Hapi Daze from
Garage Project. Mmm, tasty. Nicola had a cheese and ham toasted sandwich.
We were just across the road from the
Opera House, so a short walk took
us there, where we met up with some of Nicola’s fellow chorussers, who had got
the tickets for us. And we settled back to watch and listen.
You probably know a couple of the tunes –
Don’t Cry For Me Argentina and
Oh What A Circus. The rest were fairly standard musical fare in a variety of
musical styles from classical to latin. The story follows the rise of Eva, her
marriage to an up and coming army colonel,
Juan Peron, and her subsequent
career as the first lady of Argentina. At the end she dies. The musical ends
very abruptly at this point…I was expecting a big finale (no matter how
inappropriate that might sound), but there isn’t one.
We emerged blinking into the sunlight…ha! Afternoon performances will do
that to you!
