I think the crux of this is that Che Guevara wasn't 'Che Guevara' at that point in his life (just plain Ernesto) - so Rice was able to be creatively teasing with the identity of the character. Any doubt also plays into the idea that the Mistress might have ended up where Eva was rather than disappearing into the crowd after a brief moment in the spotlight - or did she lack the 'little touch of star quality' that Eva and Guevara had? Directors can play it one of three ways: Either the icon 'Che' as Hal Prince chose, dressed as the revolutionary; Everyman, as in the current production on Broadway; or Ernesto Guevara as a young man and not yet the iconic revolutionary. I'm not sure the latter has been done, and I suppose you could only indicate it if the actor were dressed as the iconic Che at the funeral (both beginning and end of the show) but discarded it for his younger days watching Eva's rise (false beard nightmares!). 'Everyman' seems the weakest of these to me - what's to be done with the lines that are specific to Guevara? Who wouldn't want them played with meaning? Ironically Prince removed most of the specific textual references to the real Che Guevara, but replaced them with the unmistakeable iconography.
I have Tim Rice's biog in front of me. He talks about Mario the hairdresser narrator being replaced by Che when Rice discovered a book on famous Latin American figures that featured Eva, and Che Guevara.
"The opportunity to include two Argentine icons in one story was too good to miss. I was also keen to point out that in his own way Guevara was just as ambitious, self-obsessed, fanatical and intolerant as Evita. All the same, my initial outline for the show's structure, completed by mid-1974, and featuring Mario, was not changed greatly by the subsitution of Che as narrator/critic".
"Although I am well aware that Guevara never met Eva, it is more than likely that his subsequent career was at least in part influenced by his early life under, and distaste for, the Peron regime. Indeed, in our original recording of the work, we never even stated that the narrator was Guevara. He was referred to simply as 'Che', a nickname in Argentina roughly equivalent to the English 'mate'".
That use of 'indeed' is odd as it doesn't follow from the previous sentence that seems to assert his keenness for it to be Che Guevara - so he's not helping BroadwayWorld disussion resolution very much! The main indicator of Guevara is the addition of Che's attempted pesticide business/invention (on the concept album).
"Delighted to find that he had once espoused Capitalist leanings, I decided (still without actually saying our Che was Che Guevara) to incorporate this strange ambition into the show, enabling us to suggest that Che and Eva were cut from the same grasping cloth, implying that Che had only become a revolutionary after failing to make a million".
He later says that Hal Prince "insisted on presenting Che as Guevara rather than as an anonymous Argentine who could have been Che Guevara but equally Che Sidebottom". He doesn't complain about this at all, but it does show that another way is legitimate and most likely the way Tim Rice had imagined it while writing i.e more characteristics of (and lyric references to) the young Ernesto 'Che' Guevara than Hal Prince included, but with some uncertainty remaining by dressing him as an ordinary guy in the street.
I think it sounds like a fudge, so I'm with Hal. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that Rice had Guevara in mind, both in detail, lyric references, and his own (possibly politically motivated) enjoyment of taking a sideways look at an icon.
Updated On: 6/9/12 at 09:49 AM
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