Elena Roger wins rave reviews for Edith Piaf musical

A star is reborn. The diminutive Argentinian actress Elena Roger has London at her feet after winning encore after encore and stunning reviews for playing the tragic French singer Edith Piaf at London's Donmar Warehouse. "She has folded herself into Edith Piaf so perfectly you cannot see the join," says Johann Hari in the London Evening Standard. "She might be smaller than ET but her voice is like her subject's: vast and bitter and irresistible."

"Sensationally," says Michael Billington in the Guardian, "she brings the number [Bravo Pour le Clown] to a climax by careering around the stage and charging at the audience like a wild animal. It is a tremendous performance."

Roger, unknown in Europe at the time, won similar plaudits when she played Eva Peron in the London stage revival of Evita in 2006, but many doubted that she could go on to conquer the role of the French singer as well. In the Donmar's new production of Pam Gems's 30-year-old musical play, Piaf, she has. "In doing so she begs comparison with yet another Piaf, Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard in the recent movie La Vie en Rose," says critic Michael Coveney on the theatre site, whatsonstage.

An anonymous reviewer on another site, Londonlist, goes further: "What a performance. We've never seen a standing ovation last for over five minutes... must surely be an award-winning performance."