In 1934, at just 15, the girl who would one day become Eva Perón—Argentina’s iconic “Evita”—arrived in Buenos Aires with her suitcase and dreams of becoming an actress.

From her humble beginnings in a rural town, she rose to become much more, of course, marrying president Juan Perón, wielding political power, and transforming into a glamorous heroine to the working poor.

You can see why the experience hits home with fast-rising Broadway star Caroline Bowman. She knows what it’s like to show up in a big city with nothing but a prayer and a suitcase.

As the vivacious, dark-haired triple-threat performer gets ready to take on the title role in Vancouver Opera’s upcoming Evita, she says she’s found a clear way to connect to the part. “Whoever I’m playing, I feel like I have to find a way to relate to her and tell her story through me or else I don’t know if it will work for me,” she explains, sitting in a West End café on a day off from rehearsals. “Just reading her story, I relate to her ambition—that ‘I’ve always known what I wanted and I’m not going to rest till I achieve it.’ And I admire her tenacity. She was just relentless and never let up on her goals—to her deathbed! Even on her deathbed, she wanted to fight death.”

In Bowman’s case, she had put her sights on Broadway from a young age. She tells the Straight that when she was three, her older sister died at six, and her mother’s way of healing was through performing in musicals in Maryland. Watching her mom at rehearsals, she learned to love the art form, and performed in community productions throughout her youth. Soon after she graduated from the musical-theatre program at Penn State University, she knew she had to head to New York City.

“I had just gotten my Equity card and my mother dropped me off at a tiny apartment at 52nd and 9th,” she recalls with a laugh about her big move in 2011 in her early 20s. “It had a burger joint on the corner and there were mice on the counters. It was a legit first New York apartment.”

Without even having an agent, Bowman set her sights on Wicked, applying to the casting office that handled the hit show. “Two weeks into arriving to New York they called me directly—because I didn’t have an agent!—and told me I had an ensemble part and would be understudying for Elphaba,” says Bowman, who later took the lead role as the famously green-skinned, tormented witch in the rock-charged riff on The Wizard of Oz. “My mother had come into town that day and she was with me when I got the call walking down the street.”

A couple of years later, Bowman took a chance and auditioned for the Broadway lead in Evita. “I kept getting called back and I thought, ‘Wow, this is a real possibility.’ I was doing all this work and getting coached for the part, but I was trying not to get attached to it because I didn’t want to be heartbroken. So I think I was in shock when I got the call,” she says.

Bowman went on to play the role in a Broadway revival of the famed 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice musical, then toured it through 2014. And the more she performs it, the closer she feels to the iconic character, she says. But the demanding role has huge challenges—ones that go far beyond the vocal feats of letting loose on showstoppers like “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”.

“The first few times I performed it, I had to go home and have a little bit of a cry,” Bowman admits. “I had to learn how to drop her. It was the same with Elphaba: you have the rest of the cast not liking you. Evita has a lot of negative energy in it, too—with both, there’s a lot of having to fight for them to be heard.

“It really breaks my heart, by the end, when she’s doing ‘Eva’s Final Broadcast’. I had a little routine on tour: go home and take a bath and then turn on a Netflix happy movie.”

On top of the emotional toll exacted by playing the woman’s rise from 15 to her heroic heights in Buenos Aires to her premature death from cancer at 33 is the gruelling physical challenge of the fast-paced musical. The few times Bowman is not on-stage during the two-hour-plus show, you can be sure she is backstage rushing to change into another glamorous outfit and jewellery. “I never stop. I don’t really have time to think—which is wonderful, because I don’t have time to get into my head,” says Bowman, who dons a classic blond wig for the role. “I have, like, 25 seconds to change!”

And then there is the pressure of playing a woman who not only is such a well-known, and often controversial, figure herself—to this day Evita is revered in Argentina and alluded to in that country’s politics—but who has also been played by indelible big stars. (Hello, Madonna.)

“I had to learn how to forget about that,” the affable actress says with a shrug. “People are going to come in with ideas about Evita as a person and also of what they’ve seen before on-stage. I have to do my best and that’s going to be what it is.”

Vancouver Opera presents Evita at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Saturday and Sunday (April 30 and May 1), and May 5 to 8.