THEATER REVIEW : Shades of Hillary Clinton Color Return of ‘Evita’

She’s short. She’s got a bleached blond ‘do. And tongues have been wagging about her clout.

“It’s all very well, for the lady at the side of the President,” the chorus of malcontents sing, “to show an interest in affairs. . . . She holds no elected post. She’s an ornament at most.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, right?

Wrong. Eva Peron, the first lady of Argentine dictator Juan Peron and an icon in her day, was raising eyebrows four decades before the Clintonistas set up camp in the White House.

Fifteen years after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita” first bowed, a touring company opened Tuesday at Pasadena’s Civic Auditorium. The production, directed and choreographed by Larry Fuller, has a few glitches, but the leads are strong. And this meatiest of Lloyd Webber’s works still gets you going with the one-time actress’s ascent from a Buenos Aires slum, to the heights of adoration, to her death from cancer at age 33.

Like any two-hanky biopic, “Evita” plops a larger-than-life heroine into a snazzy panorama of power, glamour and melodrama. The backdrop is 1940s Argentine politics--complete with sign-toting unions, slavish masses, malcontent generals and an antsy aristocracy--although Lloyd Webber and Rice manage to make real politics beside the point.

What you get instead is the singular rise of a Machiavelli in Chanel. The Peronista prima donna’s Mack truck-like ambition is unstoppable. And what makes the story more engrossing than, say, a pack of friendly felines or a masked opera lonelyheart, is that it’s based on a real woman who, for better or worse, touched hundreds of thousands of lives.

Speaking of worse, it falls to the historically displaced revolutionary Che (John Herrera) to serve as the Greek chorus who questions Evita’s rise. Che is usually the show stealer, and Herrera’s relaxed but assertive turn is no exception.

Fortunately, Valerie Perri’s Evita is as forceful as Herrera’s Che, although they’re both stronger in the more intimate numbers than in the mass scenes, where lyrics are sometimes lost to problematic acoustics. Her performance brings “Evita” into the Clinton Age. Que Viva Hillarita!

* “Evita,” Pasadena Civic Auditorium, 300 E. Green St., Pasadena, Thursday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 & 8 p.m.; Sunday 2 & 7:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. (818) 449-7360. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes .