EVITA is a grand contradiction. Beginning with a funeral and ending with a death scene, the musical foreshadows doom throughout. Its alluring antiheroine, the second wife of Juan Peron, President of Argentina, is corrupt, hypocritical and megalomaniacal, "Easily the most unpleasant character I've written about," Andrew Lloyd Webber, the show's composer, said just before the 1979 Broadway opening.

And even with an abstract setting and cynical veneer, Evita was described by Harold Prince, who directed it, as "an unabashedly emotional piece" that moved people.

Most tellingly, the musical is about the perpetuation of evil, the worship of fakery and the duping of the public. At the same time that exploitation, conniving and corruption are flaunted, the customers are being admonished with the words, "You're the same."