This was, I’ll admit, my first time seeing the movie all the way through. My main takeaways? Cults of personality are dangerous; we’ve played ourselves by not putting Antonio Banderas into more musicals; Jonathan Pryce is a cutie; and Madonna is heaven.

Here, 65 things I thought (and things I learned!) while watching Evita.

1. After some rather long opening credits, we are at a movie theater in Buenos Aires in 1952.
2. Uh oh. A man steps out to announce that “Eva Perón, spirital leader of the nation, entered immortality at 8:25 this evening.” Cue one crazy electric guitar lick and lots of weeping.
3. Antonio Banderas!
4. We’re now in Chivilcoy—a city just west of Buenos Aires—in 1926. It’s quite dusty and horsey here.
5. A loud argument is taking place outside of a funeral; the illegitimate children of the man who has died would like to pay their respects, but the man’s actual wife won’t allow them to.
6. Little Eva is one of the kids, and rushes into the fineral anyway to leave a flower in his coffin.
7. We appear to be back in 1952. Eva’s own funeral was very extravagant!
8. First song! Antonio is singing 🙂
9. He is…cynical about the hullabaloo around Eva’s death, and her legacy more generally.
10. “As soon as the smoke from the duneral clears, we’re all gonna see, and how, she did nothing for years.” LOL.
11. OK, chaos and general disorder montage.
12. “Instead of goverment, we had a stage. Instead of ideas, a prima donna’s rage. Instead of help, we were given a crowd…she didn’t say much but she said it loud.”
13. ALW’s main theme must sound sensational in a theater. Those strings! The cymbals!
14. Madge!
15. We’re now in Junin, a little west of Chivilcoy, in 1936, and Eva’s just spent the night with a tango singer. This seems to be the kind of thing she does often.
16. Antonio is a…waiter?…at the club where the tanger singer performs.
17. Eva has dreams of leaving the sticks and being part of “BA, Buenos Aires, big apple.” She thinks this singer’s going to get her there, though he’s trying to shake her off.
18. She has a cheer squad trying to convince him. It’s weird?
19. Eventually Eva gets her way and boards a train with him.
20. “Buenos Aires”! Such a good number—though this version’s way slower than the original.
21. The singer has a family in BA…shocker…so now Eva kind of has nowhere to go. Cue: “Another Suitcase in Another Hall.”
22. She’s become…a model?
23. Antonio—sorry, his character’s name is Ché—and Eva are now singing “Goodnight and Thank You.” The point of this number is that Eva will not apologize for using her love affairs to get what she wants!
24. The lyric “Argentine men call the sexual shots, someone has altered the rules” from all these disappointed losers is hilarious.
25. The 1943 Argentine Revolution is happening, which Ché helpfully explains in song.
26. Meanwhile, Eva is now acting—albeit poorly.
27. Aha, an intro to Colonel Juan Perón (Jonathan Pryce!), “the would-be dictator.”
28. Juan Perón boosts his profile by organizing an aid concert after the 1944 San Juan earthquake. That’s where he and Eva first meet.
29. That tango singer is part of this concert!
30. Perón is putting on a populist act. “Politics, the art of the possible,” as Ché puts it.
31. Perón/Eva meet-cute…they admire each other’s (highly questionable) work. I do like this number, “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You,” though. The sax!
32. Madge is such a beauty in this scene.
33. Alright, Eva is taking over Perón’s household (read: kicking out his mistress).
34. Polo match!
35. Ché is somehow here, too, and commenting on the fact that the Argentine upper class (and military) disapprove of Eva. (As a chorus of them puts it in “Perón’s Latest Flame”: “We have declined to an all-time low, tarts have become the set to know.”)
36. Eva’s now hosting a political radio show?
37. I love the crazy drum breakdowns in this number.
38. Perón is nervous about how much his political opponents hate him—though the unions are behind his presidential bid.
39. Another song slowed and pitched way down for this move: “A New Argentina.” The absolute acrobatics that ALW had Patti LuPone doing!
40. Eva is literally like, “He loves normies! Why would he love me if he didn’t?”
41. Perón is in jail dreaming of…not doing any of this!
42. Eva and Perón are married! The bride wore a white skirt suit with a wide-brimmed hat.
43. Ché strongly suggests that Perón’s campaign was run less than honorably…but anyway, JP wins the election.
44. I’m sorry, I’ve just taken a moment to google where the idea to musicalize this story came from, and the answer involves librettist Tim Rice’s stamp collecting. Also, he ended up naming his eldest daughter Eva!
45. I hear the first strains of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”…! Let me take this moment to plug Sinéad O’Connor’s wonderful version.
46. Rice, writing about this song in his 1999 autobiography, Oh, What a Circus: “It has been slammed by many for being a string of meaningless platitudes, but that is precisely what it was meant to be in the first place. As a speech by a megalomaniac woman attempting to bamboozle half a million people, it is right on the button; it is meant to be low on content and high on emotion, just like Evita herself.”
47. Perón and Eva sleep in separate bedrooms?
48. Eva is only 26?!
49. Bit of a makeover scene: “I came from the people, they need to adore me, so Christian Dior me, from my head to my toes.” Hm!
50. The Peróns are at large, visiting Europe. People love Eva in Spain, but not in Italy, where they associate Perón with Mussolini—for good reason.
51. She appears to physically collapse in France. Foreshadowing!
52. Ché’s now suggesting that Eva was laundering a little money via her very popular Eva Perón Foundation.
53. She really is giving virtually nothing in her big speeches: “There is only one man in our movement with his own source of light. We all feed from his light—and that is Perón.”
54. She wants to be vice president?
55. Oh boy, the people are now calling her “Santa Evita.”
56. Oh boy (again): Railway workers strike and unemployment is soaring. Public opinion seems to be shifting a little bit…though Perón is doing what he can to (violently) suppress dissent.
57. Eva faints in a church!
58. Ché also appears to collapse in the street?
59. With respect, the melody of “Waltz for Eva and Che”—a dream ballet of sorts—is completely nonsensical. And they said Sondheim wrote music you couldn’t hum!
60. Eva is dying :/
61. She steps out to give what I assume will be her final address.
62. The public mourning has already begun, but mind you, she’s not yet dead.
63. Ché is back 🙂
64. OK, now she’s dead—from cervical cancer, I’m learning.
65. Huh!