Published: 30 November 1996
The musical Jesus Christ Superstar, first performed 26 years ago, is being revived on the London stage. It provoked cries of blasphemy when it first appeared. An author and journalist who was inspired by it then went to see the new version.
I was 17 turning 18 when, back in 1970, the portrayal of Jesus Christ as a rock star first stirred my imagination and fuelled my enthusiasm in a way countless catechism lessons, sermons, and picture-book lives of saints had not done during my childhood.
I had never heard of the authors, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Yet the soundtrack of their musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, with its mixture of catchy melody line and pulsating rock, caught my attention as much as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Having heard the record first, I couldn’t wait to go and see the stage show. I was in a twilight period when hippiedom-frayed posters of a very Christ-like Che Guevara hung prominently in my room together with a poster of Herod offering a large ransom for the capture of the King of the Jews: Wanted Dead or Alive. The only crime of both men, I thought, was that each stood up, in a revolutionary sense, for the poor and forgotten. They were my heroes in a primitive, unstructured way.
We were leaving the Age of Aquarius behind us and entering instead the decade of the 1970s with its make-up and glitter and platform shoes. Jesus Christ Superstar opened in New York with Pontius Pilate played as a transvestite, and Judas in silver jockey shorts.
The director decided at the last minute against his idea of having Jesus crucified on the handlebars of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. But the damage was done by the time the production came to London, drawing the wrath of certain Christian groups that were shocked by what they felt was a cheap distortion of the gospels.
There was certainly nothing Christian in the attitude of Robert Stigwood, the impresario, whose idea it was to turn Jesus into a major commodity, opening the way to a range of merchandising from Jesus mugs to Jesus bikinis worthy of the Temple on a bad day. At one point Stigwood threatened legal action to stop a liberal convent in Australia from singing a song from the musical for charity. Like all Christians, these nuns believe Jesus Christ is theirs. What they are forgetting is there is such a thing as copyright, one of Stigwood’s spokesmen stated by way of excuse.
Nevertheless, the idea behind Jesus Christ Superstar seemed an innovative way of bringing something of the Gospel message directly to my generation, while presenting a cheeky challenge to the complacent attitudes of those who claimed a monopoly on seeing the light.
My motives for going to see a revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, 26 years on, have been rather different. I wanted to find out whether after all these years the musical was something more than just a collection of good songs that had managed to strike a chord with a particular generation. My overall judgement is that the musical has not only stood the test of time remarkably well, but also achieved a much greater sense of universality than before.
James Thane, a charming young Australian who is the managing director of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber?s Really Useful Company, told me: We?ve tried to make a show that is confrontational, that makes people think, but without all the showbiz hype.
That something very different is intended by the new producers is evident from the moment one enters the newly refurbished Lyceum Theatre. Gone is the merchandising that in the 1970s packed the lobby of the Palace Theatre. Instead of the garish Hollywoodesque space station of the 1970s, there is a soberly lit set of timber and masonry that I imagined St Joseph could well have enjoyed getting involved with.
The stage looks like a cross between the Colosseum and a catacomb. The suggestion that the audience ? regardless of race, age, or colour ? is expected not just to observe but to become involved is made by extending part of the seating on to a platform at the rear of the stage. The cast initially stand silently, casting their eyes very slowly across the full range of the auditorium, as if to say: Don?t bury your eyes in the programme sheets. This is the greatest story ever told and we are all in it together.
The confrontation promised by Thane is there from the moment Judas breaks into the first song of the show challenging some basic tenets of the Christian faith. If you separate the myth from the man, you?ll see where we soon shall all be . . . . Jesus, you’ve started to believe that you?ve begun to matter more than the things you say.
And yet this is no irreverent rock star defying God and all he stands for, still less a warped Iago-like Jacobean malcontent, as one colleague described him at the weekend.
As performed by Zubin Varla, dressed not in silver shorts but in the casual clothes of the eternal student or artist, this Judas is transformed into the symbol of man?s struggle to believe. From Varla?s first appearance, it is clear that what this rock opera has lost in shock value over the past 26 years, it has made up for in sheer dramatic force. In the end it was not Judas’s rabid scepticism that lingered most in my mind, but the terrible sense of betrayal and falling away that he conveys on handing Jesus over at Gethsemane with a passionate kiss.
Playing Mary Magdalen, the Catholic-educated actress from the Philippines, Joanna Ampil, brings another inspired mirror against which many of us can judge our own humanity. I owe a debt to Sr Margaret Magdalen’s book The Hidden Face of Jesus for prompting many reflections on a characterisation that, when Jesus Christ Superstar was first shown, drew cries of blasphemy from people who seemed to have hardly given themselves time to read the gospels.
I understand that in rehearsals Ampil, a former convent schoolgirl, was forced to work hard on absorbing some of the looks and attitudes of a one-time prostitute. Here was an actress who genuinely saw her character as central to bringing out the richness of Jesus’s relationship with women. Only a warped mind would conclude that her stroking of Jesus’s hair and occasional embrace distorts the gospels. Nor surely can one today object to what is the most beautifully delivered song of the show, I don?t know how to love him.
This is no opportunistic groupie, as a jealous Judas at one point suggests, but very much a modern woman, weary of male abuse and alienation, and finding in the eternal Christ the compassion and healing she has always longed for.
The faith of the Church is that Jesus was fully human, fully divine. Christians hoping to see this Jesus in Superstar bathed in blinding light and walking on air will be disappointed. And yet as played by the young Welshman Steve Balsamo, this is still, in my view, a production that tries hard to deliver not the Superstar of Judas?s imagination, but the Jesus of Nazareth who became man in order to share in our humanity.
Judas has been given some of the best lines of the script, and some of the better lines of the Gospel are absent from this Jesus. The tenets of our faith are chal- lenged by a scene in which Jesus, crushed by crowds of cripples, diseased, and deaf and dumb, pushes them violently away with the words: Don’t crowd me, save yourselves.
And yet by the way he speaks and acts, Balsamo not only places his Jesus firmly within the culture and religious tradition of his own time, but shows that he is also able to speak directly to us through the pain and anguish of contemporary life.
On the night I went, one could almost feel a collective sense of approval within the theatre as the first half of Superstar reached its climax. A hitherto depressed and subdued Jesus as played by Balsamo suddenly finds a sense of purpose as he stumbles on the money changers and assorted brigands in the Temple. This temple should be a house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves ? Get out!, he screams with a range of voice of almost supernatural power.
But what really makes this production come alive quite apart from the brilliance of some of the performances and the consistently good songs is the central drama of Christ?s passion as enacted with particular intensity in the second half. The passivity of Jesus, his doubts and fears, the sheer physical agony to which he is submitted, are nowhere underplayed.
The Passion gives this rock oratorio a powerful thematic coherence. And whereas the earlier production distracted from and defused the drama by magnifying the campness of Pilate, Herod, the soldiers and the high priests, here the oppressors of Jesus display a terribly real sense of intolerance, of cruelty and even of almost overwhelming evil.
From the perspective of pure religious tradition, even this greatly improved production is still liable to some of the more justifiable criticism that was aired when Jesus Christ Superstar first hit the stage. So weak is the characterisation of the Apostles with the exception of Judas that the Last Supper is misportrayed as a gathering of irresponsible drunkards with whom Jesus struggles angrily to convey the mystery of the Eucharist.
In response to the main theological criticism of Jesus Christ Superstar, one of its producers told me: We end with the Crucifixion because that is where the music ends. It is the story of Christ as a man and ends with his death.
And yet I thought I detected a hint of redemption that was lacking back in the 1970s: Mary Magdalen turning to look up at the empty cross, looking towards the audience, then raising her eyes heavenwards before finally turning and walking slowly after the body of Jesus off stage.
Even without that gesture, Jesus Christ Superstar can at the very least be put in the secular tradition of Nikos Kazantzakis. He commented once that that part of Christ?s nature which was profoundly human, helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion.
(c) 2009 The Tablet. All rights reserved
