Mikayla Anne Reed got the original cast recording of “Evita” when she was in eighth grade and played it over and over again.

Now the 28-year-old actress will have a chance to interpret the title role — and go beyond her teenage impression that it was “pretty music” that never grew stale. With a local resume that includes several Indianapolis Civic Theatre productions and, most recently, the farcical role of Veneera Glossover in “The Zippers of Zoomerville” last summer at the Phoenix Theatre, Reed will lead the cast of Civic’s season-opening production.

Reed, a teacher at Zionsville Middle School, naturally made a study of the title character, Eva Peron, upon landing the role established in the 1978 musical hit by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

“She was both loved and hated,” Reed said. “I had to think about (the fact that) she wasn’t just a musical-theater person that was created for the stage but a real person.”

A vain, ambitious woman who connected with Argentina’s poor people in the 1940s and 1950s as mistress, then wife, of dictator Juan Peron, Evita provoked extreme reactions. Her early death of cancer at age 32 added to her mystique.

Reed came down on the side of sympathizing with Evita, though Rice wrote the role using a biography widely seen as unsympathetic to the heroine.

“You can’t help but make her larger than life,” Reed said. "She did all these things for the people, but she spent an awful lot of money on herself. She wouldn’t have gotten to where she was if she wasn’t extremely aggressive and forward with the people she came into contact with.

“She’s very confident and striking. But there are those moments of vulnerability; they’re very subtle at first and they keep getting bigger and bigger toward the end.”