A few weeks ago, I was looking at the list of movies expiring from Netflix in March and saw that one of them was Evita. I first saw this movie in middle school and used to listen to the soundtrack (on cassette tape!) all the time. So I decided to watch it while I still could.

It was pretty much exactly how I remembered it, although I’d forgotten how much I love Antonio Banderas’s voice.  Dude can SING! But the song that really jumped out to me upon this rewatch was “Another Suitcase in Another Hall.” As I’ve mentioned before, I think most good musicals have one really underrated song, and this is Evita‘s.

I’ve never seen it on stage, but as written for it, this song is sung by Peron’s mistress after Peron leaves her for Eva. In the movie, this was changed so that it’s Eva singing it earlier, after the end of her affair with a singer, and there’s a very short reprise where the mistress sings just a few lines of it. (The mistress only has about two minutes of screen time in the movie.) But the fact that it can be used for two different scenarios is one reason why I like the song so much. The best show tunes are the ones that can stand on their own, ones you can understand without knowing the context into which it was written. It’s a breakup song that could really be sung by anyone feeling hurt by the end of a relationship.

Here it  is in the movie, but I also found a YouTube clip of a version by the wonderful Samantha Barks, so I’ve included that, too.