Mummies, Ghosts, and Skeletons
General Perón's team of stylists (Sebastián Vitale, John Hager Flores, Gerald Montoya, Michael Vitaly Sazonov) prepare to enshrine the beauty of their beloved Evita (photo by Stan Weinstein).
By Rebecca Park, Contributor
GALA Hispanic Theatre in Columbia Heights recently concluded their 2008-2009 season with the world premiere of the musical Momia en el closet: The Return of Eva Perón. Portraying the legend of the celebrated Argentinean through the exploits of her mummified body, the GALA-commissioned show offered a colorful alternative to the more staid Western pop culture vision of Evita.
With a book by Venezuelan Gustavo Ott and music by Argentinean Mariano Vales, the performance came alive with a distinctly local flavor. This wasn’t history told through the eyes of an imperial outsider, but the paradoxically flesh-and-blood and mummified myth of a woman whose impact continues to be felt to this day.
Strongest when truly breaking down language barriers (GALA’s purported aim), the show’s music and dance—an easy blend of tango, waltz and salsa—was all about love (both personal and patriotic), turmoil and resurrection. A number like “Silencio/Golpe 55” (“Silence/Coup 55”) was a quiet, mournful elegy that addressed the violence of Argentine history, while the repeated salsa-styled refrain of “momia, momita” (“mummy, my mummy”) expressed the people’s highly emotional devotion to their Evita. By using artistic forms specific to Argentine culture—as opposed to the aria-esque wailing advanced by Andrew Lloyd Webber—the audience experienced the historical figure and ensuing myth with the same wealth of feeling that her people did.
But, unfortunately, while the musical succeeded in capturing clearly the continued relevance of Eva Perón, it doesn’t necessarily make it accessible. The awkwardness of the staging—harsh lighting and disjointed hovering images passing as set backgrounds—left the viewer without a specific enough context to process the historical implications of what was being presented. More detrimentally, the tone was shockingly uneven, wavering into between fantasy, passion, patriotism, from the most noble of sentiments to the most lowbrow of kitschy slapstick comedy. How do borderline offensive flamboyant singing-and-dancing stylists fit in with the tragedy of military coup murder? And technical delays between spoken Spanish and the projected English surtitles certainly didn’t help.
Leaving the theatre, I didn’t quite know what to think. Here was Evita, part-woman, part-legend, vividly depicted yet muddled in the messiness of the surrounding stage. On second thought, though, what better impression could I have conceived? Eva Perón, like all national figures, was a whole lot more complicated than her followers would like to believe, as human as she was a political and popular institution. And when the eulogy becomes an established myth, the afterlife can be just as confusing.
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