Rachel Zegler's West End Evita performance comes under fire as 'multiple people fall ill' while trying to catch a glimpse of the star's famous song during the soaring heat

's recent West End Evita performance has come under fire after 'multiple people fell ill' while trying to catch a glimpse of the star during the soaring heat.
The performer, 24, belted out Don't Cry For Me Argentina on the balcony of the London Palladium for her performance in Evita on Thursday.
An estimated 200 people gathered outside for hours to see the star's performance, but after standing for so long under the sun emergency services reportedly had to be called moments before her appearance.
A source told The Sun: 'As word spreads more and more people are flocking to the Palladium to see Rachel's performance and it's turning into a bit of a nightmare.
'Crowd control is bad enough on the public street but with the heat it's becoming really dangerous.
'Ambulances were parked outside the venue for almost an hour before racing to the hospital just minutes before Rachel appeared.'
MailIOnline has contacted London Ambulance Service for a comment and further information.
Rachel is playing former First Lady of Argentina Eva Peron in the show, which debuted in 1978 and was written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The play follows her rise from a poor background to becoming a powerful political figure and cultural icon in Argentina.
For her performance of the iconic song, Rachel donned a white strapless dress and sported a platinum blonde wig styled into a chignon.
The actress put on a passionate performance for the crowd gathered outside but not all were happy with the staging of the show.
Furious fans took to social media to express their frustration that they will not see Don't Cry for Argentina on stage, despite paying for tickets.
One person wrote: 'Sorry, are you saying I've paid £350 for 2 tickets and she's singing the biggest number outside at people who haven't paid?'
Another explained that they 'go to the theatre to share the same space with a performer'.
Others, however, said the move would help encourage more people to go to the theatre.
Abi, a 21-year-old student from London, said: 'I think it's making theatre more accessible.
'It's actually adding to the ambience of the show.
'The speech she does at the end of the song does hit completely different seeing it outside. It adds so much more to her performance to see her do it to the people.'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Sky News

32 minutes ago

• Sky News

From niche to a billion pound industry: How immersive events have taken over

While cinemas are struggling and London's West End has witnessed a significant escalation in ticket prices, creatives behind immersive experiences say their sector is experiencing "a gold rush moment". From shows built around obvious fan bases - such as Mamma Mia! The Party - to those working with established intellectual property, including Squid Game: The Experience, the UK has proven to be a world leader when it comes shows that make audiences feel part of the action, rather than just observers. Little Lion Entertainment are the team behind two shows currently running in the UK: Pac-Man Live in Manchester and the Crystal Maze Live in London. Its CEO Tom Lionetti told Sky News: "There has been a real boom in the experience economy… It kind of feels like a bit of a gold rush moment in this industry. "It's not nascent anymore, it really is a big industry and it's getting bigger. "West End theatre is incredibly expensive at the moment and even cinema can be expensive for what it is, so I think it's about caring about the experience … you've got to consider value for money these days." Their Crystal Maze show challenges ticketholders to climb through tunnels and collect crystals just like contestants on the '90s programme. And it's one of the longest-running immersive shows in the world, still going strong in London 15 years after the concept was first staged. "The genesis really was this idea of breaking the fourth wall," Lionetti says. "I was an actor and I come from a theatre background, but what we were really intrigued with was giving people agency so you become the star of the show." Last year, according to the Gensler Research Institute's 2025 Immersive Entertainment & Culture Industry Report, the global market for immersive entertainment was valued at £98bn - and it's projected to reach £351bn by 2030. Despite times being financially tough post-pandemic, while cinemas have been struggling to put bums on seats, the continued popularity of experience events could indicate consumers are being a little more choosy about what they spend their hard-earned wages on. Our eagerness to show off on social media could also account for some of what's driving the boom, as well as the isolating nature of how technology-dependant we've become. As Secret Cinema's senior creative director, Matt Costain, explains: "Whether it's competitive socialising or immersive experiences, people are look for something that offers them more… and this is an example of an activity where people can come together and have a sense of community." Secret Cinema - which combines live performance and film screenings - has been staging events for 15 years now. In that time, they've partnered with major studios from Marvel to Netflix. Their latest offering will run from August see them bring Grease's Rydell High to life. Costain says: "When we first started this was niche, film fans who wanted to dress up and keep a secret… but immersive has moved mainstream and we've found ourselves one of two or three companies who've been in it since the beginning. "Part of our job as artists is to help people remember that they really love to play." He jokes that those "who find it the most difficult to get started" are invariably the ones "at 11pm with their tie tied around their head and dancing on a table". While there are many shows working with established intellectual property (IP), there are also some hugely creative original works also being produced - Storehouse being one of those. For 16 weeks, attendees at Staged in Deptford, which was once the archival store for Rupert Murdoch's News International, will be guided through a story that takes place inside a 'digital memory palace' that supposedly houses every story, message, memory, and meme since the dawn of the internet. Produced by Sage & Jester, its lead producer Rosalyn Newbery explains: "You're not moving into a theatre with infrastructure, put it this way, we literally had to bring electricity to the venue, bring power to the venue, bring water to the venue, none of that was there for us… it's a big old job and there's a lot of detail that you can't take for granted." Over 7,000 crew worked more than 57,000 hours to build the set. Getting a show of this size and scale off the ground is a feat in itself. As creative director Sophie Larsmon says: "There are a lot of people trying to get these projects off the ground and there are a lot of projects that never see the light of day…because of the hoops that have to be jumped through for licensing and financing. "It takes huge amounts of creative effort, I've seen a lot of projects where quite late in the process the green light is taken away." While some creators might struggle to access support because the work doesn't fit into traditional cultural boxes, it is certainly an industry that's worth shining a spotlight on. As Larsom says: "The UK has always led the way in developing this form… I think people are cottoning on to the fact that this is a sector [that's] going to be a big revenue earner for the UK."

The Guardian

an hour ago

• The Guardian

Cats review – Andrew Lloyd Webber's tired show has run out of lives

There are musicals, and then there's Cats. Andew Lloyd Webber's show is often the one held up as a bewildering example by non-believers. People dress as cats in leg-warmers and sing children's poems, and it's a hit? The baffling body horror of the 2019 film didn't do much for the show's image, either. It was the 80s, loyalists say, it was a different time! But Cats is back, and theatre producers would prefer we just buy a ticket and live in the past. Cats is perhaps best now as a fond memory, where you can forgive its wilted structure, stop-start pacing and tired stereotyping (don't even try to count how often a female cat is there to sigh and swoon over a male one). There, you can enjoy how the score is drenched in 80s synth and peppered with pastiche, with hints of jazz, music hall, rock and a little opera (one of Lloyd Webber's great loves); it is catchy as all get-out. Memory, the plaintive cri de coeur by fading glamour cat Grizabella, was a genuine chart hit, lingering in jewellery boxes and hold music. And Gillian Lynne's original choreography, oddly sexy and determinedly feline, lives on in plenty of giggly shared stories between friends of sexual awakenings and Rum Tum Tugger. To bring it back, unchanged – as is happening now in Sydney – feels like a return to the worst of the megamusicals craze: cashing in on a known quantity even after its cultural cachet has faded. The production now playing at Sydney's Theatre Royal is a 40th anniversary celebration of the first time the musical made it to Australia (featuring Debra Byrne, Marina Prior, and John Wood) and it's like time has stopped. There are no surprises. It's even back in the same theatre. There are a few joyful moments – the best of them featuring Axel Alvarez, who plays 'the magical' Mr Mistoffelees, the cat with a light-up coat who delivers his magic through ballet, including a dazzling number of fouettés. His astonishing ease and classical technique is the very best of what Cats can be. Mark Vincent is perhaps at his stage best as the beloved Jellicle leader Old Deuteronomy, Tom Davis is a joyful, all-in Skimbleshanks (that's the railway cat), Todd McKenney pleasingly hams it up Gus the Theatre Cat, and Gabriyel Thomas, tears in her eyes as she sang Memory, earned ringing cheers as Grizabella. The cast and creative team are producing beautiful work – those full-ensemble dance formations brought forth applause every time the cast found themselves moving together as one – but what a shame it's all in service to the same old Cats, which can't hide its flaws with novelty any more. Even worse is that you'd never know it in Australia, but internationally, Lloyd Webber – who the Pulitzer-winning critic Andrea Long Chu described as the force that 'set Broadway on its current path of chintzy commercial nihilism' – is facing a generational shift. Cats lasted in the West End for 21 years and Phantom on Broadway for 35 – and the artists who grew up with these silly, thrilling works are mining them for new meaning and contemporary beats, testing how much they can speak to this moment. In the UK, Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express (about trains – it is Cats on roller-skates) has returned in a completely new production – with the train Greaseball now played by a woman with queer undertones. An upcoming production of Phantom of the Opera is running a guerrilla marketing campaign that has theatre influencers breathlessly reporting on every incident. Jamie Lloyd brought a blood-soaked Nicole Scherzinger to a cool Sunset Boulevard, netting three Tonys in the process; he's now reimagining Evita with Rachel Zegler, who sings Don't Cry for Me Argentina on a balcony to crowds outside the theatre. And, heartbreakingly for those of us a world away, Cats has been revolutionised in New York, refashioned in the underground ballroom scene built by queer and trans people, where speaking those secret Jellicle names and claiming identities has a new, deeper resonance. It's hard not to feel left out. In Australia, nostalgia rules, and we've had a parade of paint-by-number Lloyd Webbers keeping our best employed but our creative cups empty. In the past year or two, we've had a faithful but tough-to-watch Sunset Boulevard starring a miscast Sarah Brightman; a straightforward Jesus Christ Superstar, and an outright offensive Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. When it comes to plays, Australia is leagues ahead with new productions that interrogate, elevate, and subvert old works; with musicals, especially on main stages, we tend to defer to the tried-and-true. There are pockets brimming with ideas – the Hayes Theatre in Sydney has been home to some of the best – but we have to let old shows run their course if we want to give space to new artists and new perspectives – and bring in new audiences. Can't we give Cats a new life too? Cats is on at Theatre Royal, Sydney until 6 September; then touring to Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane

Times

2 hours ago

• Times

Dua Lipa review — playing it safe at sold-out Wembley

Playing her largest ever headline concert at the first of two back-to-back hometown mega-shows, Dua Lipa strutted through a two-hour maximalist spectacular of costume changes, confetti blizzards and weapons-grade pyrotechnics as 90,000 screaming fans packed into a sold-out Wembley Stadium. This show boasted more sequins than stars in the Milky Way, a glittery catwalk parade of precisely engineered corsets, and the hardest working hair in showbusiness. Just enough glamazon razzle-dazzle, in fact, to elevate Lipa's oddly anodyne music, which remained in generic dance-pop mode for most of the evening. Plenty of killer outfits, too few killer tunes. Falling a year after the 29-year-old British-Albanian diva topped Glastonbury's main stage, these Wembley performances mark the British launch of Lipa's year-long Radical Optimism world tour, which kicked off in Australia last November. Divided into four acts, the set was sprinkled with tracks from the 2024 chart-topping album of the same name, which in fairness sounded more sparkly and dynamic than their studio versions, especially the opening stomper Training Season and the warmly melodic Falling Forever. In Taylor Swift fashion, Lipa has been punctuating this tour with bespoke cover versions that change every night, including a few guest duets featuring the original artists themselves. Having previously tackled classic crowd-pleasers by AC/DC, Kylie, Daft Punk and more, she called on Jay Kay of Jamiroquai for her Wembley debut. Now grey of stubble but still reliably goofy of headgear, Kay shared vocals on his vintage 1996 funk-pop hit Virtual Insanity. Anyone under the age of 40, which was most of the audience, appeared slightly baffled but cheered politely anyway. For a mainstream star with multiple global chart-toppers, three Grammy awards and billions in streaming sales, Lipa has an impressively rich cultural hinterland. Alongside the usual catalogue of luxury brand endorsements and charitable causes she also hosts a respected podcast interviewing authors, politicians, business leaders and fellow stars. She is commendably outspoken on politics, even contentious issues such as Israel and Palestine. Patti Smith recently endorsed Lipa as a feminist trailblazer, which is both surreal and sweet. The pity is that very little of this extra-curricular depth filtered through to her carefully polished stage persona in Wembley. Instead, Lipa peppered the set with bland boy-meets-girl lyrics, beaming selfies with fans and obligatory humble expressions of gratitude to the audience for making her teenage pop-star dreams come true. Which was charmingly soppy but, for such an obviously bright and engaged artist, dull to an almost calculated degree. After a dazzling, gravity-defying interlude on an elevated podium stage ringed by fire, Lipa galvanised herself for the finale with a disco-tastic medley of stronger tracks including her breakthrough hit New Rules, her Grammy-winning Barbie soundtrack contribution Dance the Night, and her almost-anthemic recent smash Houdini. In high-energy performance terms, she gave us everything. But in the confessional, funny, emotionally vulnerable terms that make good pop stars truly great, she gave us almost nothing. Businesslike to the last note, with an almost Tom Cruise-level of steely professionalism, the sense she left behind was a laser-focused star who knows how to work a room brilliantly, even when it's the biggest room in Britain.★★★☆☆Dua Lipa plays Wembley Stadium on Saturday, June 21, and Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 24 and 25. Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews