Theatre
Theatre review: Jesus Christ Superstar
Was it worth resurrecting this musical?
July 11, 2019 12:49
Was it worth resurrecting this musical?
July 11, 2019 12:49For those who may wonder if this show’s title might put it beyond the reach of the JC’s theatre column, it should perhaps be noted that it all started with a Jew. No, not that Jew.
I refer to theatre producer David Land who saw in the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat enough talent to give Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice a weekly wage to come up with another show.
The only proviso was to leave the Bible alone. Maybe Rice and Lloyd Webber interpreted the instruction as referring to what they might call the Old Testament. At any rate the result was not a show but an album. Only after it became a chart hit was it first staged in 1971.
For this resurrection Timothy Sheader’s award-winning production, first seen at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre in 2016, stays true to those album origins with a show that is much more of a gig than a musical.
Now recast, Robert Tripolino and Ricardo Afonso play the leads of Jesus and Judas in a display of power singing that becomes a kind of aural joust.
Tom Scutt’s set of iron girders on a construction site provides an elevated platform for the potent on-stage band. And the original leap of imagination that compared Jesus’s fame to that of a pop star still holds in today’s culturally, Twitter-driven, trashier times.
Though, actually, the zeal transmitted by Tripolino’s mostly mild-mannered Jesus feels more like that of a cult than an example of unearned adoration. Tuned-in, dropped-out followers gather serenely in his presence.
Outside this bubble of love Samuel Buttery’s gold-skinned Herod appears like decadent one-man orgy and also gets to sing Jesus perhaps the best of Rice’s lines in the show: “prove to me that you’re no fool, walk across my swimming pool”.
However, the quality of sound does little justice to Rice’s emergent lyric-writing talent. And so Jesus’s gospel and Judas’s beef with him wash over you in waves of passionately expressed but distorted zeal.
As for the score, I realise this is probably a minority opinion but despite the album’s reputation and the respectively irresistible and undulating numbers Superstar and Hosanna, the music never made me a disciple of this show.
Still, when Afonso and Tripolino let rip there is no doubting that the potency of this work, even if, in one respect, the show’s creators or indeed the writers of the original story on which it is based, may not have expected the final note struck during the press night of this revival.
It was sounded not by the cast but the modern audience during the curtain call, when Judas clearly received a more rapturous ovation than Jesus. Make of that what you will.