Theatre’s Greatest Stunts: From Evita to Miss Saigon
The West End has seen its fair share of spectacular productions, but some shows have stood out for their innovative and daring stunts. According to The Times, the latest production to make headlines is the musical Evita, which began previews at the London Palladium on Saturday. The show’s director, Jamie Lloyd, has once again pushed the boundaries of theatre with a coup de théâtre that has left audiences and critics alike in awe.
The stunt in question involves Rachel Zegler, who plays the lead role of Eva Perón, appearing on the balcony of the London Palladium every night to sing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”. The performance is relayed on a giant screen to the crowd of around 600 people gathered outside the theatre, who can enjoy the show for free. The tickets for the show inside the theatre range from £25 to £215, but Zegler’s balcony performance is a rare moment of theatre reaching out beyond its four walls. As Zegler told Vogue magazine during rehearsals, “We’ve been dubbing it Eva Perón’s Coachella set”.
This is not the first time Jamie Lloyd has used innovative stunts in his productions. The Times reports that his shows tend to be light on scenery, rich with trickery. For example, when Lloyd staged Romeo and Juliet last summer, with Tom Holland as Romeo, he stuck the Spider-Man star on the roof of the theatre for the scene in which Shakespeare’s young hero is exiled. Cameras followed him up there and then through the backstage area as he made his way back on to the stage.
Lloyd’s productions often walk a thin line between the excitingly novel and the merely gimmicky, but it’s one that he keeps pursuing. As he told The Times in 2014, “We see so much boring theatre. We sit through it and it’s just dull and it doesn’t have to be”. His next project is a Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, reuniting Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters, co-stars of the 1989 comedy film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
The Times has identified some of the greatest coups de théâtre in recent theatre history. Here are a few examples:
### 1. A Walk Around the Block in Sunset Boulevard, West End 2023-24, Broadway 2024-25
The first half of Jamie Lloyd’s Andrew Lloyd Webber revival was already a twist on expectations: extensive use of a giant monochrome screen, little scenery, and Nicole Scherzinger’s powerhouse performance as a younger-than-usual Norma Desmond. And then the second half begins, the title song strikes up, and the cameras follow Tom Francis, as the leading man Joe Gillis, while he strides through the backstage area, past a cardboard cutout of Lloyd Webber (and the real thing at one performance), then out of the building and around the block before returning via the stalls for the song’s finale.
### 2. A Full-Size Helicopter Lands in Miss Saigon, West End 1989-99, Broadway 1991-2001
The musical Miss Saigon used a lifesize 1,700lb helicopter to rescue its leading man from war in Saigon, a helicopter big enough for 13 men to clamber into. There was also a plan B for the times the helicopter didn’t work, which “essentially amounts to blinding the audience with light and adding a lot of smoke”.
### 3. The Set Collapses in An Inspector Calls, National Theatre, London (1992-now)
Stephen Daldry’s bold take on JB Priestley’s morality play features the Croft family’s comfortable Edwardian home first existing like some giant doll’s house on stilts amid a wasteland and then collapsing at the end. This production, a massive hit when it opened at the National Theatre in 1992, has seemingly been on tour ever since.
### 4. Ariel Swims Under the Stage in The Tempest, Almeida, London 2000/2001
The Almeida in north London loves a water effect. For its production of Shakespeare’s late romance, Aidan Gillen as Ariel swam underwater for some of the show and was suspended upside down for other parts of it.
### 5. A Ship Crashes into Stranger Things, West End 2023-now, Broadway 2025
The theatrical version of the Netflix sci-fi show features an abundance of extraordinary technical effects. The opening scene operates at a scale normally kept for the big finale: a huge 1940s US navy ship — not quite lifesize — runs aground, then vanishes into another dimension.
### 6. Defying Gravity in Wicked, Broadway 2003-now, West End 2006-now
Elphaba has been hopping on a broomstick and flying away from the Emerald City for decades. The flying effects have been around since Peter Pan first visited Neverland in 1904, but there is still something properly jaw-dropping about an effect where you can’t see the wires.
### 7. Donning Headphones for Macbeth, West End 2023-25
David Tennant’s Macbeth and Cush Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth talked in a truly conspiratorial near-whisper, but the actors were close-miked and the audience were wearing headphones that caught the actors’ every breath and the show’s eerie sound design.
### 8. Baring All: Daniel Radcliffe in Equus (West End 2007; Broadway 2008-9); Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room, Donmar Warehouse, London 1998
A nude scene is not that unusual, but when someone as famous as Harry Potter gets his clobber off, it can’t help but be a talking point.
Evita is at the London Palladium to September 6. For more information, visit evitathemusical.com. Source: The Times.
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