Another Suitcase in Another Hall

Written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the song is presented during a sequence where Eva throws her husband's mistress out on the streets.Upon its release, the song garnered positive response from music critics and reached the top ten of the charts in Italy and the United Kingdom.[2] According to director Michael Grandage, the story took the "edge off" a supposed fairy-tale-like interpretation of Eva and Juan, unveiling their ambitions and cutthroat personalities.Dickson and her manager, Bernard Theobald, had a discussion with Rice and Webber about starring in the musical, but her voice was declared "too delicate" for singing the numbers on Evita.[contradictory][3][4] Dickson recalled that during the recording sessions, Webber asked her to sing in a higher range than her usual, since the "mistress" character was a teenager, and should have sounded younger.[3] Before the sequence of the eviction of the mistress occurs in Act I of the musical, Eva's character sings the song "Hello and goodbye" and then "Another Suitcase in Another Hall" begins.Part of the song's popularity lies in the way it finds an image—the suitcase in the hall—to express the nomadic nature of modern civilization, the feeling of urban rootlessness that many people experience.Author Mark Ross Clark noted in his book The Broadway Song: A Singer's Guide that her vocals portrayed different emotions.How lucky Lloyd Webber and Rice are to have Julie Covington and now Dickson, to add the flesh and bones to songs which might otherwise be wrecks of soppy melodrama.While performing it later in her concerts, Dickson sang it in her actual tone, saying that although the track "might have been written for a teenage girl, but the experience of being abandoned by a man is one, women of all ages can relate to.[16] Recording sessions for the film's songs and soundtrack began in September 1995, and took place at the CTS Studios in London with Madonna accompanied by co-actors Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Pryce.[17] An emergency meeting was held between Parker, Webber and Madonna where it was decided that the singer would record her part in a more contemporary studio while the orchestration would take place somewhere else.[21] Originally, there were talks about releasing an Evita EP, containing remixed versions of "Buenos Aires", "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" and "Another Suitcase in Another Hall", but it did not materialize.[34] Peter Keough, from the Boston Phoenix, described the track as "a poignant, winsome exploration of pathos, defilement, and resolution sung by a young, struggling Eva forced into prostitution with a series of drab johns".[35] The Guardian's Jude Rogers wrote that "Madonna's wavering vocal goes full collywobbles", placing the track at number 69 on her ranking of the singer's singles, in honor of her 60th birthday.[36] Finally, Billboard picked it as the singer's 98th greatest song; "the delicate composition and high-register vocal make this exquisite breakup ballad a rare moment of true fragility in Madonna's catalog".