‘There’s so much history and energy held in there [the Palladium],’ says Soutra Gilmour, Evita’s set and costume designer (pictured)
Johan Persson
July. It’s the day following Evita’s Opening Night and The London Palladium reception brims with flowers. ‘This is nothing on what was there yesterday,’ the receptionist says. If it wasn’t already, owing to the headline-grabbing, audience-drawing balcony scene – when Eva Perón (played by 24-year-old Rachel Zegler), fully transformed into Evita, blonde-wigged and Christian Dior-dressed, sings ‘Don’t Cry for me Argentina’ before the thronging masses on Argyll Street – it is now very much the talk of the town. The morning’s papers beamed: ‘Viva Evita! Viva Zegler!’ and ‘Believe the hype. This is one for the history books’. Lord Lloyd Webber, Pedro Pascal and Ben Whishaw descended for press night, not to mention Keanu Reeves, Nita Ambani and Hayley Atwell. Three unprompted standing ovations broke out mid-performance, the audience, apparently unable to contain their adulation – but this was more than just a theatrical love-in.
‘There’s so much history and energy held in there [the Palladium],’ says Soutra Gilmour, Evita’s set and costume designer and theatre director Jamie Lloyd’s 20-year-long creative partner-in-excellence. ‘When it’s electric, it really goes,’ she emphasises, sat in a sparsely-decorated, wood-panelled room right at the very heart of the 114-year-old theatre, at the end of a maze of corridors and doors that seamlessly move between the front and back of house. ‘It’s a 2000-seater but it’s got an intimacy… how do you create that? It’s something that holds the energy,’ says Gilmour, speaking a mile a minute, dressed in a blue Adidas striped top which goes with her same-colour, same-brand shoes and blue-rimmed spectacles. Gilmour, who celebrated opening night at the Century Club on Shaftesbury Avenue – ‘it was absolutely boiling’ – is already on to the next project: Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot which will open on Broadway in September.