There's an eerily prophetic line close to the very opening of "Evita," the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that chooses to sing about the brief, bizarre life of Eva Perón and her joint rule of Argentina with her dictator-husband, Juan. The evening opens with the announcement of her death at 33….

The lady's coffin is not yet closed, though. That will be done by Che himself, slapping the great lid shut and sending clouds of dust flying into the bleak, steelwork sky. He then sings the couplet that is going to prove both accurate and, to the entertainment, damaging: "As soon as the smoke from the funeral clears / We're all gonna see she did nothing for years."

That is precisely the problem confronting director Harold Prince and the onetime authors of "Jesus Christ Superstar." As they have charted out the enterprise, Evita is going to use a sleek-haired...