The Balcony and the Spotlight

Eva Perón’s myth was immortalized in Evita. Sinéad O’Connor, in a fragile, devastating cover of its signature ballad, revealed the personal cost of speaking truth before the world was ready to hear it

On one stage, a woman promised to carry her nation; on another stage, another woman tore at the silence of an institution. Both sang, both burned brightly, and both paid dearly. What remains is a song—part anthem, part elegy—that holds their stories in tension.

It’s an odd fact that Eva Perón, beloved wife of Argentine dictator Juan Peron, got a Broadway rock opera and Sinéad O’Connor has yet to. Both women lived high profile lives, both carried their private pain into the public square, and both became lightning rods for their countries’ hopes and rage. One sings from the balcony of the Casa Rosada and promised to carry her people with her, the other tears up a photo on live TV in the hope that she could affect change in a corrupt institution that profited from misery — and in both moments, they turned their voices into weapons.

Eva Perón’s life was so fantastic, and her following in her home country of Argentina and abroad still as outsized as her personality by the time she succumbed…