Don’t Cry for the Ferndale Repertory Theatre

Because they’re doing just fine with a very enjoyable production of Evita which plays on weekends until May 13.  I saw it on Saturday night, and they did a great job with a very difficult musical play.

I have fond memories of the musical from my youth.  Not that I really think it’s all that thought provoking or brilliant.  It just passed in front of me at a formative moment in my senior year of high school.  I saw it at the Orpheum with a young woman friend who also liked the dancing and music even though it was, in her words, “a Broadway glorification of fascism.”  I do miss dating young radical women, as annoying and dogmatic as some of them were.

Of course, until my generation passes, you’ll have to hear lot’s of “it’ll never be the same without Mandy Patinkin and Patti Lupone in the lead parts,” and everything will always be compared to their production – which began on Broadway in 1979.  I saw it on one of the later tours in 1982 in front of a liberal San Francisco audience, during the Falklands War, so that when LuPone uttered her line, “if the King of England can do without the lady of Argentina, then Argentina can do without England,” the whole audience cheered despite the faulty context. (more below the fold)