Art of the Possible Lyrics - Evita

Song Overview

Review and Highlights

Short track, sharp teeth. I hear it as a cold march - clipped strings, barked lines, and the unnerving calm of a man testing the room. In staging, the number turns power into a children’s game: seats, bodies, elimination. On record you still feel the shuffle - the way alliances form and vanish in a bar or two. It’s not a showstopper so much as a signal flare: Perón is in play, and rules are furniture.

Highlights

• Concept-as-staging: the famous musical-chairs motif boils a coup down to procedure.
• Text-book cynicism: aphorisms like “one always claims mistakes were planned” land like policies, not punchlines.
• Eva’s cut-in: a sudden timbral shift - brighter register, urgent diction - slices through the khaki gloom.

Creation History

When the show moved from concept album to stage, director Harold Prince wanted a compact way to chart Perón’s ascent. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber answered with this number - a minimalist, game-like sequence that replaced an earlier exposition song. Choreographer Larry Fuller’s original staging made the metaphor literal: officers circling chairs as the music thins, then snaps.

Song Meaning and Annotations

Plot

We drop into a smoky room where military men coolly codify survival. Each phrase reduces politics to muscle memory: pick easy fights, bless the fools, pivot left or right if it keeps you seated. Eva breaks the cadence - not yet a political force, but already speaking like a signal tower. Outside the room the chant begins: a name gathering mass. Inside, one man keeps his chair.

Song Meaning

This is the show’s ethics statement for power. The lyric frames politics as craft over creed - success measured by occupancy of the seat, not the cost of acquisition. The message doubles as a warning: when the game rewards agility over accountability, a country can slide while officials keep time perfectly. Mood-wise it starts sardonic, turns predatory, then flashes hopeful when Eva’s voice pierces the din - a brief light, quickly swallowed by the room’s real business.

Annotations

“One shifts left to right”

That line grabs the slipperiness of Peronism - an elastic blend that borrows from both sides depending on what the moment requires. The music mirrors that fence-hopping by never committing to a lush, resolving cadence; it holds you in a terse loop.

“[EVA]”

The annotation notes Eva’s activism blooming around Perón’s rise. The show nudges the timeline a bit, letting her voice puncture this scene earlier - theatrically useful, because her entrance reframes the men’s tactics as the problem she intends to answer.

“I’m only a radio star with just one weekly show”

In the cast album’s architecture, that wink back to “Goodnight and Thank You” is no accident. Rice writes like a journalist - he wants you to track the resume. The line reads as both confession and credentialing: she knows the medium and how to move through it.

“We are tired of the decline of Argentina…”

Those bars sit notably higher than the surrounding material, a vocal flare that foreshadows the crowd-surfing rhetoric of “A New Argentina.” It isn’t subtle, and it shouldn’t be; the show wants you to hear how clean slogans slice through bureaucratic fog.

Rhythm and Orchestration

Square pulse, clipped attacks, low brass nudges - it feels like a drill, not a waltz. The austerity is the point: you hear governance reduced to tactics. When Eva arrives, the color lifts - brighter vowels, more air - then the song clamps back down.

Production and Performance

On the 1979 Broadway recording you get Patti LuPone’s clean cut-in, Bob Gunton’s unruffled authority, and Mandy Patinkin’s quicksilver commentary orbiting nearby. It’s tight theatre craft - every syllable doing work.

Cultural Context

The lyric’s “possible” isn’t about hope; it’s about what can be done inside a system that rewards survival. That ambiguity is baked into the Perón project - populist cadence, pragmatic maneuvering - which keeps the number hovering between satire and instruction manual.

Key Facts

• Artist: Original Broadway Cast of Evita feat. Bob Gunton, Patti LuPone, Mandy Patinkin
• Composer: Andrew Lloyd Webber
• Lyricist: Tim Rice
• Producers: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice
• Album: Evita (Original Cast Recording)
• Release Date: 1979
• Label: MCA Records
• Length: 2:39
• Genre: Musical theatre, rock-opera inflection
• Instruments: orchestra with prominent snare, low brass, strings, guitar, keyboards
• Language: English
• Mood: sardonic, martial, strategic
• Music style: tersely rhythmic, aphoristic lyric over tight ostinato

Questions and Answers

Who produced “The Art of the Possible” on the Broadway cast album?

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

When did the Broadway cast release this track?

1979, as part of the Original Cast Recording.

Who wrote the song?

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Tim Rice.

Was it issued as a standalone single?

No. Later Evita singles centered on other titles like “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and the film’s new song “You Must Love Me.”

How is it staged on screen?

In the 1996 film, it appears in a sequence tied to “Charity Concert,” with Jonathan Pryce’s Perón amid officers as the power dynamic condenses for the camera.

Awards and Chart Positions

• Tony Awards context: The original Broadway production of Evita won multiple 1980 Tonys including Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Book, Best Actress (Patti LuPone) and Best Featured Actor (Mandy Patinkin); Harold Prince won Best Direction; David Hersey won for Lighting.
• Grammy: The Broadway cast album won the 1981 Grammy for what is now called Best Musical Theater Album.
• Film soundtrack milestone: The 1996 movie soundtrack - which includes “Charity Concert / The Art of the Possible” - peaked at no. 2 on the US Billboard 200 and topped several national album charts.

Additional Info

Other recordings and adaptations: The 2006 London cast recorded a compact version; Brazilian stagings have performed the number as “O Dom da Política,” demonstrating how the chair-game metaphor translates well across languages.

On staging: Many revivals keep Hal Prince and Larry Fuller’s musical-chairs concept; some reinterpret it more darkly, swapping chairs for disappearances or wrestling eliminations to underline the menace.