Narrative Structure Of The Musical Evita

The musical <Evita> is a world-famous masterpiece created by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice.This musical is based on the legend story of Eva Peron who is the first lady of Argentina,and the distinguished theme song “Don't Cry for Me Argentina” is the portrayal of her whole life.The musical <Evita> follows the heroic struggle of Eva Peron while setting the character “Che” to assess Evita's efforts from third-person perspective and portraying all the characters by different music theme for promoting the plot development.In this work,we will systematically analysis the scenario and music from local to whole respectively,and combine the mentioned two parts above to investigate the basic narrative elements,artistic skills and narrative logic.The whole thesis can be divided into four main parts.The first chapter is the introduction of the creative and historical background of musical <Evita>.The second chapter focuses on the analysis of the basic narrative elements in <Evita>,investigations of plot and music elements have been done in this part.The third chapter aims to inquire the artistic skills of <Evita> by studying the special narrative technique which relies on the switch of the first-person and third-person perspective and the musical expressions.The last chapter is based on the narrative structure of <Evita>.In this part,drama functions and musical features of “Che” have been analyzed and the two main drama clues of this musical have been also investigated in the same time.Furthermore,the narrative structures of script and music in musical <Evita> have also been studied in the fourth chapter.In conclusion,the musical <Evita> employs a special narrative skill which is the combination of first and third person perspective to form the two main drama clues in this story,the combination of script and music leads to an outstanding feature which is the narration interspersed with comments.