Jesus Christ Superstar

 Bristol Hippodrome

Current theatrical etiquette states that all shows and all gigs have to conclude with a standing ovation. I am therefore inclined to remain enthusiastically recumbent unless the show is very good indeed. It turns out that the same etiquette says that individual songs never get standing ovations, however good they are. I didn't realise this. Which left me feeling a proper charlie when I was the only one on my feet after Ian McIntosh did the best version of Gethsemane I have ever heard. 

The trouble with Jesus Christ Superstar is that it is just too good. The sense of showstopper following  showstopper without pausing for breath feels almost exhausting. There's not one song you could call filler until after the interval. Maybe Jaded Mandarin out stays its welcome, and Could We Start Again please is a nice enough ballad which is only there because theatrical pacing needs a nice enough ballad at that point. 

As a show, it takes considerable theatrical risks. It goes directly from the high drama of Jesus' trial straight into the high camp of Superstar itself -- and then actually puts the crucifixion on stage as pure theatre of cruelty. I saw the original London production around 1978, and I recall that Jesus was allowed to remain relatively serene. The black and white photo outside the theatre had a stained glass window look to it. Tonight, he is heavily shrouded in smoke; lit from behind; twitching and in obvious agony. So we're looking at a musical full of dance numbers and catchy tunes which ends up with a fairly graphic depiction of torture. And there is no escape clause. Les Miz ends with the pathetic death of Valjean, but it follows it up with a rousing Do You Hear The People Sing as the fallen revolutionaries welcome him into heaven. Godspell went straight from the crucifixion ("God is dead") back to John the Baptist singing Prepare Ye The Way of The Lord -- skipping the resurrection, arguably, but pointing forward to the Second Coming and sending you out of the theatre with a spring in your step. Superstar makes you watch the removal of Jesus body from the cross, accompanied by an aching instrumental reprise of Gethsemane, and ends the show right there. There have been a few posts on social media about theatre-goers who allegedly didn't know the story and expressed surprise or disappointment at the down-beat ending -- but really, this isn't how musical theatre is meant to go. 

We're told that the original cast of Godspell used to say the Lord's Prayer together before they went on each night. Jesus Christ Superstar has no pretensions to be a "Christian" show in that sense; but it fundamentally trusts the story. Tim Rice has clearly engaged with the canonical Gospels and every line could be justified. It's hard to believe that this is the same lyricist who wrote the airily silly Technicolour Dreamcoat four years previously. But then, it's equally hard to believe that Andrew Lloyd Weber is the same composer who would impose Starlight Express on us only a decade later. 

Possibly there is something of Joseph's Coat in the repeated "Poor old Judas/So long Judas" refrain. That's one of the few moments of theatrical bathos; of deliberately not treating a serious moment seriously. There had been a fad for jokey Old Testament cantatas with names like Jonah-Man Jazz in 60s and Joseph clearly came out of that tradition. Superstar mainly avoids it. Herod is corny and camp and vulgar, of course, but his arrival is a theatrical masterstroke. There needs to be some break in the relentless Passion narrative, but where is the comic relief in the story of the crucifixion? Herod only appears in one of the four Gospels (for reasons we don't need to go into), and a dead-literal reading of the text provides the black comedy the show needs a dose of. "And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him." I am sorry to say that Julian Clary was this evening's one major disappointment. He carried the scene on charisma and star quality (along with a wonderful frock and an excellent dance routine) but he didn't do anything with the role, and made no actual attempt to sing. 

The anti-Judaism in the text may be a bit of an issue, particularly right now. I could have done without Judas dipping his hands in silver paint when taking the Priest's blood money. But I enjoyed the Priests coming on stage with what appeared to be mitres, and flipping them round revealing microphones for This Jesus Must Die. The production had a good shot at mitigating the text's one serious theological misstep. It is a fairly venerable theatrical tradition, stretching back to the Mystery Plays, to conflate the Jewish temple and the priesthood of Jesus' time with contemporary Christian churches and clergy. And tonight the temple traders are depicted waving neon crosses (which also, I suppose, point forward to the crucifixion). But there's no getting away from the fact that Tim Rice insinuates prostitutes and drug dealers in the Holy Place: this Jesus is the Christian Messiah purifying a corrupt Judaism. (The Temple existed in order to make sacrifices, and couldn't function without people changing coins and selling livestock; so the Biblical Jesus wasn't purging the temple so much as challenging its very existence.) But I think the production largely avoids any unnecessary tropes that aren't implicit in the text or the source material.

Les Miserables is a tangled thicket of revision; and Cabaret seems to get rewritten from scratch on every revival, but the different versions of Jesus Christ Superstar remain surprisingly consistent. (The one exception is Then We Are Decided, which appears in the movie version but not in the stage show.) Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at the small ways in which Tim Rice (I assume) has tweaked the libretto. In most cases, he is simply fixing weak lines: "One thing I'll say for him, Jesus is cool" becomes "Infantile sermons, the multitude drool". "What is truth? Not easy to define" is a great improvement over "What is truth? Is truth unchanging law?". "Our conquerors object to another noisy sect" seems to have reverted to "I am frightened by the crowd, we are getting much too loud." But I was particularly surprised that the big climactic line in Gethsemane has mutated from "God your will is hard but you hold every card" to "God your will be done, destroy your only son". I think that's new to this production. The old version tended to present Jesus as Everyman railing against the divine sadist; the crucifixion was something done to Jesus by God. The revised version has pushed the Jesus of Jesus Christ Superstar a notch back in the direction of the Jesus of the New Testament. Which opens a substantial can of theological worms. 

Superstar never shows us Jesus as a particularly charismatic figure. We see fifty thousand people worshipping him, but we never quite understand why. The show shows us the aftermath of his ministry, when he is quote "sad and tired" unquote, but we have no idea what Jesus would have looked like when he was "inspired". There is a tiny paraphrase of the lilies of the field right at the beginning ("leave tomorrow for tomorrow/think about today instead") but that's not much to base a ministry on. The main thing we know is that he's not a political figure and doesn't want his disciples to fight on his behalf. The text is all about what was imposed on him by others -- "the difference is, they call him King", say the Priests; "the crowd crown him King which the Romans would ban". "Now I understand you're God?" sneers Herod. "You've started to believe the things they say of you" says Judas. Jesus answers Pilate evasively and won't talk to Herod at all. 

The idea that Jesus's message was changed, distorted, misunderstood -- and that a purer, truer, more Jesus-like Christianity could theoretically be recovered -- is a very pervasive one. Tim Rice seems to be at least flirting with The Passover Plot -- a speculative 1960s text which painted Jesus as a revolutionary who engineered his own crucifixion (with Judas' connaivance) in the belief that it would cause the Judeans to rise up against the Romans. What we know as Christianity was created by the disciples after this suicide-by-Empire went disastrously wrong. This kind of thinking pervades Jesus Christ Superstar. The disciples at the Last Supper aren't really listening to Jesus: they are already thinking about how they are going to tell the story in order to preserve their own posthumous reputation. The title song, Superstar, is about the imposition of ideas on an essentially passive Jesus: tell us if you're what they say you are; are you what they say your are; who do you think you really are? 

Which is, one has to say, considerably better theology than that of the average Thought For The Day pundit. If there were really people who didn't know the story, they will have had their attentions focussed on the identity of Jesus. Anyone who hears any version of the Christ-story without asking "are you what they say you are?" hasn't understood it. But it's hard to see what the pragmatic, principled Judas could ever have seen in this person. He rejects both the revolutionary message ("can't you see we must keep in our place") and the religious one ("no talk of God then") but it isn't clear what that leaves to admire. 

We're trying to have it both ways. At one level, it's the Christian Church who have turned Jesus into God -- the thousands of millions who Pilate dreams are crying out for the man he condemned. But at another level, it was Jesus's immediate contemporaries who told the story, distorting it and mythologising the true message. Which may be why Tim Rice never tells us what Jesus said and did before the curtain goes up. If Mary Magdalene and Peter have entirely misunderstood his message ("I think you've made your point now" -- what point?) what chance do we have of rediscovering it?

Jesus was all right, said John Lennon, but the disciples were thick and ordinary: it's them twisting it which spoils it for me. He had also been reading the Passover Plot; and went on to make some careless remarks about the relative popularity of Christianity and his little rock and roll band. "Every word you say today" says Judas "Gets twisted round some other way." That's is, of course, also the central joke in Monty Python's Life of Brian. 

And yet, in this version, Jesus, speaking to God, out of earshot of the disciples, but watched by the audience, describes himself as God's Only Son.  And that puts us right up against C.S Lewis's poached egg. Either Judas and Pilate are in the right, and Jesus is a nutter who needs to be put away, or... 

The production seemed closer in spirit to the original 1972 London show than to either the 1972 or 2000 movie versions. It approached the piece as a party, a rock and roll gig, or a disco. The action is substantially abstract and the characters have little naturalistic nuance. Jesus, Mary and Judas are three figures around whom an ensemble performs energetic dance routines, sometimes giving the impression that Jesus is being followed around by an aerobics class. (The movements of one performer in particular was so extreme that I was put in mind of Barak Obama's "anger interpreter".) Pilate accompanies himself on a guitar while narrating his dream; Jesus similarly looks like a Dylanish troubadour during the Gethsemane number. 

This approach does tend to underline how few characters, in the conventional sense, there are in the show. Only Judas, whose story it essentially is, and in fact Pilate, have anything you could call a narrative arc. Mary Magdalene (Hannah Richardson) gets one very good song (Everything's All Right) and one complete and utter show-stopper (I Don't Know How To Love Him) and then hangs around on the fringes of the action. Her big moment, as first witness to the Resurrection, never comes. Simon Zealotes emerges from the ensemble for one (very good) song; Peter doesn't do anything apart from deny Jesus. James and John are only names. The 2000 movie invented "business" during some of the musical interludes to flesh out some of the background characters. That version treated Superstar (the song) as portraying the journey to Calvary; this one offered us a trio of soul singers a bevy of manic dancers and an increasingly falsetto Judas going wild on the stage; a marvellous piece of musical theatre, to be sure, but arguably more disrespectful than anything the Pythons would have dared. I am possibly a little surprised that the line about Mohammed moving a mountain was not excised. It's in the epic soliloquies that the show really shines. Judas is a gift of a part and Shem Omari James gives it everything he's got, and some more. I thought the suicide could have had more horror: are managers leery about depicting suicide on the stage, I wonder, or were they afraid to invoke the ghost of Inspector Javert? Rya O'Donnell as Pilate has to more or less carry the dramatic climax single handedly, and rises to the occasion: perhaps more the contemptuous military thug then the brooding politician. But he gets the understated dream song spot on as well. "Then I heard them mentioning my name, and leaving me the blame". But the absolute stand out was Ian McIntosh's Jesus. It's an unforgiving part: he's passive for almost the whole of the second half; and even at the beginning he's mostly responding to other characters. His only major act one piece (Poor Jerusalem) is briefly touching but not likely to stop many shows. I guess his power is precisely in the contrast between him and the frenetic action going on around him. At first, I thought he was going to do an understated Gethsemane, accompanying the opening sections on a guitar, as if he was blowing in the wind, but he gradually builds to an hysterical rock climax, with the narrow beamed spotlights tearing across the stage for the first time. I guess the whole musical builds up to this moment; and I guess that's a true reading of the texts. Gethsemane is the upper room where it all happens: everything else is just an outworking of that. 

Who are you, what did you sacrifice? Jesus doesn't know either.

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