There is a measure of success for a musical that is far greater than any Olivier or Tony award. It is when children run amok in playgrounds trilling the tune of a show’s title song. That is when you really know a show has become embedded in the wider culture, even if, as was the case with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s very Christian 1970 follow-up to their essentially Jewish first hit Joseph and His And His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the children changed the lyrics to “Georgie Best, Superstar, wears flower knickers and a Playtex bra.”
When one of musical theatres most recognisable melodies sweeps in, I can’t stop those words from attaching themselves to the tune, and wonder who was the child who eclipsed Rice’s relatively pedestrian, “Do you think you’re what they say you are.”
And so, just as happened with Timothy Sheader’s award-winning Regent’s Park Open Air production in 2016, the mind once again conjures the underwear as beams of celestial spotlight converged on this show’s new star Sam Ryder, the singer who rightly became a big deal as the UK Eurovision contestant in 2022.
Here there is a sense that Ryder sings within himself until the second act. This is where he truly lets rip with his trademark air-splitting high notes with the song Gethsemane. Yet the question when the casting decision was announced was not whether Ryder can handle his songs but whether he can act between them. The slightly harsh judgment on that score is… not yet. With his long golden hair there is a conspicuous sense of this messiah not quite knowing where to put himself, especially as Tyrone Huntley expertly reprises his charismatic Judas from the original iteration of this production. And although Ryder spectacularly launches himself to the higher reaches of Lloyd Webber’s score, the lower registers are not sung quite so convincingly. The real star turn therefore is Desmonda Cathabel, who, as Mary Magdalene, sings with the earnest ease of a Joan Baez. David Thaxton’s Pontius also delivers a performance of great power, control and range.
This is a show in which Jesus’s modern-day co-religionists – that is Jews not Christians – are likely to view events in this sung-through rock opera with perhaps more limited emotional involvement than others.
It can be a bit like sitting in church during Easter. For those who haven’t had the benefit, Jews are mentioned a lot. Sometimes blame is attached. Not so much here. The perps are the Romans and the ridiculously gilded King Herod, a flamboyant cameo role that during the show’s run rotates through a handful of star names starting with Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson in his first London show since appearing at the National in Sondheim’s final musical Here We Are. Still when the crowd bay for Jesus’s blood and flay him to near death, they are presumably his fellow Jews. The plot is not what you might call explicitly clear.
Yet theatrically the evening is impressive. Tom Scutt’s set looks like its been knocked together by a gang of scaffolders yet actually contains more than one stunning design coup. And just as with the recent revival of Evita, which also began life at the Open Air, Lloyd Webber’s composition seems to get better the older it gets. Or perhaps that should be, as one of those who sang his tune in the playground, the older I get.
Jesus Christ Superstar
Palladium and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane
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