Elena Roger – La Pasión de:

Elena Roger, de Evita y Piaf a una gira de piano y voz. — Elena Roger recorre el país junto al pianista Nicolás Guerschberg con un repertorio que reúne canciones de sus personajes y clásicos argentinos.

Only one Argentine actress has a Laurence Olivier Award, British theater’s highest honor, at home, and this week she’s in a van headed for Tucumán. Elena Roger, the voice that conquered the West End as Eva Perón and Édith Piaf, is touring Argentina with pianist Nicolás Guerschberg in a concert for piano and voice. This Saturday, November 14, she performs at Tucumán’s Teatro San Martín before heading to Salta, Jujuy, Córdoba and La Plata. The tour ends with two shows on December 11 and 12 at Buenos Aires’s Teatro Coliseo. At fifty-two, the performer who could have stayed in London living off the applause has chosen what she always does: to keep working, try something different and come home.

The Ensemble Years: A Passion Built Show by Show

Born in Buenos Aires on October 27, 1974, Roger trained in the most demanding school there is: the ensemble. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, she appeared in nearly every major musical on the Argentine stage, including Drácula, Beauty and the Beast, Les Misérables as Fantine, Saturday Night Fever and Fiddler on the Roof. She also toured Europe with Tango por Dos and took on television roles. By 1997, she had already been nominated for a Trinidad Guevara Award as a breakthrough performer.

Her first starring role in a show she helped write came in the 2003–04 season with Mina… che cosa sei?, a show about the Italian singer that she co-wrote with director Valeria Ambrosio. It earned her the ACE Award for Best Actress in a Musical. The show brought to light what those ensemble years had been nurturing: a voice of unusual power in a tiny frame and an ability to transform herself that would soon take her across the Atlantic.

Evita: A Buenos Aires Actress for London’s Most Argentine Role

In 2006, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice were looking for a lead for the first major West End revival of Evita, and their search took them to Buenos Aires. They chose Roger, who had to learn to act and sing in English for a role drawn from her own country’s history. The opening at the Adelphi Theatre made her a star overnight. The Times called her a revelation, and the run earned her first Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical.

Six years later, she reprised the role on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre, alongside Ricky Martin as Che and Michael Cerveris as Perón. She was the first Argentine actress to play Eva Perón on Broadway. Between the two productions of Evita, she also appeared in the comedy Boeing-Boeing, directed by Matthew Warchus, and in Stephen Sondheim’s Passion at the Donmar Warehouse, which earned her a third Olivier nomination. Three nominations for three different shows: no other Argentine actress had made such a mark on the London stage.

Piaf, the Little Sparrow Who Won Her an Olivier

If Evita made her famous, Édith Piaf made her a legend. In 2008, at the Donmar Warehouse, she took on the challenge of playing the French singer, another tiny woman with an enormous voice. British critics were won over, the show transferred to the Vaudeville Theatre, and in 2009 Roger won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical, an unprecedented achievement for an Argentine performer.

Piaf became her signature role, one she returns to as though visiting a friend. She toured the production around the world, with a stop in Buenos Aires, and revived it in the 2023–24 season, fifteen years after it first opened, her voice and body still trained for its demands. In between, she broadened her dramatic repertoire with ¡Ay, Carmela! (2015), LoveMusik (2016), in which she played Lotte Lenya, and El cartógrafo. What defined her was the craft itself, across genres.

On Tour: A Passion Stripped Back to Piano and Voice

Her current work shows her craft at its most stripped back. Produced by Adrián Suar and Preludio, the 2026 tour takes her and pianist Nicolás Guerschberg to more than a dozen theaters, with stops in Santa Fe, Paraná, Montevideo, Resistencia, Corrientes, Tucumán, Salta, Jujuy, Córdoba and La Plata before two final shows at the Coliseo in Buenos Aires. The set list maps out her life: “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” “Je ne regrette rien,” “La vie en rose,” “Como la cigarra” and “Balada para un loco,” songs from the characters she has played alongside songs from her country.

Roger put that restlessness into words in an interview with La Capital: “Variety is what I love most about this profession.” The line explains a career in which she has never coasted on a past success. She could have been London’s Evita forever, but she chose to play Piaf, Fosca, Lenya and Carmela and is now touring theaters across Argentina as a singer. For Roger, the passion lies in getting to the next rehearsal.