Jennifer Lopez’s pointless audition for a hit 1996 movie: “I had been practising for weeks”
Jennifer Lopez had to wait to get her musical breakthrough.
Although she has been overhyped for much of her career, her output is somewhat baffling because she didn’t make a musical until just recently with the reimagining of Kiss of the Spider Woman from director Bill Condon. Lopez was a bona fide pop sensation and had proven herself as a movie star with her performance in the Steven Soderbergh classic Out of Sight, but musical roles seemed to keep eluding her until recently, yet this wasn’t necessarily from a lack of trying.
Hollywood had faced scepticism about musicals ever since a few disasters at the tail end of the 1960s, and the industry never truly recovered from the fear that a botched Broadway adaptation could tank an entire studio. The few musicals that went into production in the decades that followed were under intense scrutiny, often only getting made because a high-profile talent was attached, of which one of the most highly anticipated was Evita, based on the award-winning stage production from Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The film was given to a sturdy set of hands in Alan Parker, one of the most underrated filmmakers of all time, who had already helmed music-oriented films like Pink Floyd: The Wall and The Commitments, but he also directed classics like Get Carter, Birdy, Midnight Express, Angel Heart, and the Oscar-nominated Mississippi Burning.
While Jonathan Pryce and Antonio Banderas were added to the cast early on, the search for who would play the titular role was quite intensive. However, Lopez had been preparing for the role in full fervour before she learned that there was never any question about who would be cast.
“I went to audition for Evita for Alan Parker,” she told Variety, “I had been practising for weeks, and I sing my heart out, and he goes, ‘You’re amazing. You know Madonna has the part, right?’”
The legacy of Evita is a somewhat complicated one. Although it was a box office success and earned strong responses for Madonna’s singing, it felt like the movie didn’t quite become the instant classic that it seemed like it could have been on paper. Even though it was immaculately designed, earning five Academy Award nominations (including a win for ‘Best Original Song’), Evita felt like it simply couldn’t match the hype of what it was like to see the show live on stage.
In fairness to Parker and Madonna, this may have had something to do with the source material; Webber’s musicals have been notoriously difficult to translate to the big screen, and many of them have been completely botched. The Phantom of the Opera, which is perhaps one of Webber’s most famous, was adapted into a film by Joel Schumacher that was merely decent, and alternatively, the recent adaptation of Cats by Tom Hooper is considered to be one of the worst films ever made (not just musicals).
That Evita falls towards the top of Webber adaptations might not seem like high praise, but it does serve as a pretty decent introduction to the world and music of the original show. While it is easy to criticise the film for falling short of expectations, it would have been a whole lot worse if it were Lopez in the titular role, and not Madonna.
