Eva/Nacha/Cristina and the Argentine Trinity of Local, National, and Global Urban Politics

Abstract

In September 2008, internationally known Argentinean performer Nacha Guevara reprised her role as Eva Perón in the biographical Eva, el gran musical argentino (‘Eva, the Great Argentine Musical’).² For the first revival since the musical’s successful 1986 premiere (and not to be confused with the 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice rock-opera Evita), Guevara — who also co-wrote the original book and co-directed the restaging — chose to open Eva in La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, rather than, as we might expect, in the nation’s capital and cultural metropole. This was not simply a matter of an ‘out-of-town’ preview; the richly staged and budgeted production in La Plata’s lavish Teatro Argentino was largely underwritten by the province’s governor, Daniel Scioli, through the provincial general budget and with the support of a local bank (the Banco de la Provincia).³ Given both Guevara’s and Scioli’s strong ties to the Justicialist party of Juan Perón, it was not surprising that the president of the nation and leading member of that Peronist party and its left-leaning multiparty coalition, the Peronist Front for Victory (FpV), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, chose to attend the La Plata premiere rather than wait until the production moved to Buenos Aires five weeks later.

‘God is everywhere, but he holds office hours only in Buenos Aires’

(qtd in Foster, Lockhart, and Lockhart: 3)¹