How the musical was written -- Jesus Christ Superstar (3 of 5; Episode 26)

There is a new show out there, and this one is, boldly enough, a re-telling of the story of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Judas.  That, by itself, is likely to be controversial.  And to take on this sacred topic the cast prepares itself by…covering the body of performer playing Christ and having the castmates lick it off of him, to get “closer to Jesus.”

The stage crew is pulling together the props and set pieces to make the show work which include… plastic tambourines, fish, enormous protozoa-like creatures, representations of the man in the moon, strings of beads hanging from poles, boulders, and a gigantic set of false teeth.

Jesus will need to be crucified, and for that the actor playing Jesus will be wrapped in what one reviewer will call an “auto-erotic silver artichoke.”  He’ll be followed around by his conscience, which will be represented as a group of performers dressed in puffy suits that look like the stay-puffed marshmellow man.

Do these seem like typical staging choices to represent the final days of Christ to you?  And this is definitely NOT a parody; this is miles from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.  None of these are attempts to make fun of, or deconstruct, the story of Jesus.  They are legitimate efforts to enhance the story.  Why are they so weird?  Why were they there?  Did they propel the show to success or did they have to be overcome for the production to become the very first to run for 8 years in London and serve as the protype for both rock operas specifically and megamusicals overall?  Our sermon will be begin shortly, no this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

Transcript

Jesus Christ Superstar, episode 3

There is a new show out there, and this one is, boldly enough, a re-telling of the story of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Judas.  That, by itself, is likely to be controversial.  And to take on this sacred topic the cast prepares itself by…covering the body of performer playing Christ and having the castmates lick it off of him, to get “closer to Jesus.”

The stage crew is pulling together the props and set pieces to make the show work which include… plastic tambourines, fish, enormous protozoa-like creatures, representations of the man in the moon, strings of beads hanging from poles, boulders, and a gigantic set of false teeth.

Jesus will need to be crucified, and for that the actor playing Jesus will be wrapped in what one reviewer will call an “auto-erotic silver artichoke.”  He’ll be followed around by his conscience, which will be represented as a group of performers dressed in puffy suits that look like the stay-puffed marshmellow man.

Do these seem like typical staging choices to represent the final days of Christ to you?  And this is definitely NOT a parody; this is miles from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.  None of these are attempts to make fun of, or deconstruct, the story of Jesus.  They are legitimate efforts to enhance the story.  Why are they so weird?  Why were they there?  Did they propel the show to success or did they have to be overcome for the production to become the very first to run for 8 years in London and serve as the protype for both rock operas specifically and megamusicals overall?  Our sermon will be begin shortly, no this episode of THM.

[put intro here]

This is the 3rd episode that has focused on JCS; the first two have focused quite heavily on what the actual Biblical story of Judas is.  The short version is that there is more than one, they are contradictory, and anyone attempting to dramatize the last days of Christ is going to have some choices to make.  In this episode we’ll go over what those choices were and how they contribute to a meaning for the show, and next time we will dwell at much greater length with the question of how those choices hit the audience and what makes the show work.  A few episodes from now we are going to jump face-first into the absolutely crazy connection between the show, the history of Christian church as it emerged immediately after the death of Jesus, and a recently discovered gnostic text that…exactly as the musical does…re-tells the story of Jesus’ death from the perspective of Judas.  This ancient document was discovered well after the musical hit the stage, and if you’ve never heard of the gnostic Gospel of Judas, well, let’s just say how it fits with the theological perspectives of JCS are mind-blowing.  Stick with this series and we’ll get to that in a couple of episodes.

As always, I deeply, deeply appreciate your support, especially in the form of listening to the show.  We are working to make this show viable and the most important way to do that is to grow the audience.  If you are enjoying this production, and are willing to take 5 minutes to help keep it going, find the musical theater show you like the best, or an episode of this podcast that you like, and drop it on your social media with a shout out to your friends, acquaintances, and elderly relatives to check it out.  So far we’ve covered The Man of LaMancha, Phantom, Cats, and Les Miz, so if you are interested in the deep backstories of those shows go back and check them out.  If you know someone who is crazy about one of those shows please send them the link.  You’ve heard every podcaster ever say this, but these things really do make a difference and I really, really do appreciate your support.  If you can, drop me a line on the show email, which is posted on our buzzsprout site.

Today we are going to cover the way JCS came into being and the production overall.  I’ve been relying pretty heavily on Jessica Sternfeld to give the production origin stories, but for this one we’re going to rely on the doctoral dissertation of Christopher John McGowan of the University of London.  For those who have not walked the gauntlet of your PhD, imagine you go to college for four years, then two more for a masters degree, and then four more for a PhD.  At the end of that process you are supposed to take on a question in your field that nobody has ever produced a definitive answer before and write a book about it.  Some of the science ones are shorter, but if you are in theater or the humanities you write for a while.  So the last step is to write a book, the deadline is more or less open-ended, and you have to finish it before you can get on with the rest of your life.  And you have to convince a committee of your professors to vote for you passing, and usually one of them quits or gets in a big fight with another one somewhere along the way.

McGowan’s thesis is 308 pages long, but much more awesomely it is 99,999 words long, and I like to think it was an even 100,000 and then he just deleted a word to produce that exact number.  If you’re a baseball fan, pitcher Turk Wendell wore number 99 and when it got his first $1m contract he asked them to take a penny off so that the number would be 999,999.99, which is awesome.  But, he also used to brush his teeth in between every inning he pitched, so make he too the baseball superstition thing a little too far.

Back to musical theater!

McGowan points out that, although they would both go on to do some really important stuff both together and separately, this was the show that launched them both.  You’ve probably heard of ALW, and we have detailed his massively successful career, with more than a handful of smash hits, he now owns a chunk of the West End, and he’s listed as like the 3rd wealthiest entertainer in the world and one of the richest guys is in the UK.

As a quick overview, Superstar will appear as an LP release in 1970, debut on Broadway in 1971, and then open in London’s West End in 1972.  And five years before all of that, the two collaborators met in 1965.

Rice wanted to be a pop singer who had attended college at a school named Lancing College with a quick stop at the university of paris, worked some college jobs and took a stab at law school, and finally got a job at EMI records working as a gopher for a producer named Norrie Paramour.  Lloyd-Webber’s parents were both music teachers and his Dad, in particular, was the choir-master and a professor at the Royal College of Music.  Andrew won a scholarship and then took a year for intensive composition  at the Royal College of Music, where his Dad was a professor.  I will say that in the Bruschke family, where both my spouse and I teach at CSU Fullerton, the only university that was really not on the list for either of our kids was Fullerton.  But, evidently, that wasn’t an issue for Andrew.  He liked both rock and classical music, and like most college-aged folks, preferred rock to Broadway style stuff.

The two met in 1965 when Rice was 19 and Webber was 17, they had a few failed collaborations involving pop singles and musical theater, but then they wrote a “pop cantata” based on the book of Genesis that was performed at a London preparatory school.  As fate would have it – and it is all connected! – one of the pupil’s had a Dad named Derek Jewell who wrote for the Sunday Times, and he wrote a glowing review of the show.  That show was actually not Superstar but its cousin titled Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  But on the strength of the national press, two managers hired them on a three-year contract, they managed to get a staging from – get ready for this.  The Very Reverand Martin Sullivan, Dean of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral invited a production of Joseph, which was very well received as well.

This convinced them they could write a good show based on religious themes, and according to McGowan the original idea for Superstar came from Rice and the duo pitched to Sullivan the idea of a show based on the life of Jesus Christ.  [Excited] This was based on Tim Rice’s idea – that he’d had since he was 10 – that he could write a play about Pontius Pilate or maybe even Judas and make Jesus a kind of backdrop character – and got fueled with a 1964 song by Bob Dylan called “With God on Our Side,” and so they pitched their idea to theater producers who, fully grasping the idea of religious themes in popular musical theater, [deadpan] universally rejected the idea.  The kids were interested in the Beatles and not the Bible.

So the two wrote something about Richard the Lionheart, not a bad idea, but it was a total flop.  That, says McGowan, strengthened their resolve to write something based on Jesus.  There are no atheists in foxholes or theater flops.

So in 1969 they record the title track, Superstar, as a single.  The male lead singer they used was Murray Head, who would also go on to record “One Night in Bankok” which hit the charts in 1984 and still appears periodically on my local classic rock station.  Even more importantly, he is the older brother of Anthony Head, who plays Giles the librarian in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The musicians were The Grease Band who backed Joe Cocker, who was also on the MTV rotation in 1984, but was more noted for his appearance at Woodstock.  And they hired a bunch of vocalists from the Trinidad Singers and the City of London ensemble.  The whole thing cost a fortune, which was unusual then and now, but a producer named Brian Brolly backed them all the way and the thing got released.

It was released and did not cause a stir in the UK, but it did get noticed in Australia, Belgium, and Holland, sold 100,000 copies in the United States.  The whole idea had been to turn the whole thing into a musical, not a single or an album, but they pursued it as a last resort.   They wanted the recordings to generate enough interest to get a theater to take it on.  Not a bad idea, but it had never happened before.  What did work, though, was that it forced them to focus on the music, and that was where the artistic energy went.

It expanded into a 90-minue double-album released in October of 1970.  For those of you who do not remember a time before smartphones, music was all produced on Vinyl at that point, the big 33 and 1/3rd records that were about 10 or 12 inches across, and if you had too much music to fit on one you split it up and put it on two vinyl disks.  Most music only had one disk.  It cost a pile of cash to produce, and ALW and Rice again spent it all really went for a great recording.  According to Sternfeld, it works, and the album stands the test of time and still sounds great if you hear it today.  Per McGowan, “the LP became a worldwide hit and, within just over a year of release, the highest-growing British-made album of all time.”  Yep, it exceeded Seargeant Pepper.  McGown adds this qualifier: “by 1971 only 40,000 copies had been sold in the UK: it was the two million copies sold in the USA by that year (grossing £10 million) which ensured that Superstar opened on Broadway before the West End.”

Derek Jewell, the guy who had written the review of their schoolhouse version of Joseph, wrote a review of the album, which of course was positive.  That will give us a chance to dwell a little more on what the show is about.  We did some of this in the last episode, but there is more to say.  Here is Jewell’s summary in the review:

“Without in any way injuring the idea and character of Christ as the Son of God which the Bible portrays, Judas is presented far more sympathetically – a realist who had supported Jesus as a liberal reformer, healing and giving to the poor, but who is frightened once his leader begins to act as God, appearing to head up a rebellion against Rome, which Judas believes will cause the occupying power to smash their movement.”

Not everyone would agree that there was no injury done to the idea of Jesus as the Son of God, but the plot points are indeed as Jewell describes.  The story is told from the perspective of Judas, and the central conflict is over whether Jesus is a secular political leader or whether he is indeed divine.  Judas thinks that if Jesus turns his political reform movement into a religious one then the Roman government will come by and stamp them out.

Here I will return to our friend Jessica Sternfeld, who wrote the book with the title Megamusical which has guided us through a bunch of our prior episodes and who has agreed to have coffee with me, since we now work about 20 minutes from each other, although we have yet to find a time that fits both of our schedules.  She points out that the musical Hair was an important precursor.  It featured rock music, it ran for five years, and it was basically a slice-of-life look at hippies and some of their ideas, so it was a little light on plot.  Sternfeld writes: “The lack of plot is not necessarily a negative features, and plenty o fsuccessful examples of musical theater work this way.”  It also appealed to a younger audience than the traditional musicals, and it had as its director an off-broadway, avante-guard type named Tom O’Horgan.  Put a pin in that name, we’ll get back to it.

The album comes out in 1970 but it won’t be performed on Broadway until 1971.  And something very cool and unexpected happened in that short time between.  This is according to Kathryn Post, writing for the National Catholic Reporter in 2021 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the show.  The Broadway show would open in October of 1971, but 8 months before that, on March 25, 1971, at a small, private, Lutheran college named Gettysburg College, they held a guerilla performance of the musical.  It hadn’t been on the stage yet so they weren’t trying to recreate the musical.  It was entirely student led.  Many of the students weren’t musicians or musical theater performers.  Post quotes a seminary intern.

Weeks into the rehearsals they got a court order saying they had to shut down for copyright reasons, but instead they printed no advertisements, called the performance a dress rehearsal, and presumably didn’t charge for tickets.  It was a massive success – “Despite the lack of printed publicity, the performance attracted more than 1,200 audience members, some of whom sat on windowsills or stood outside to catch the sound of drums and electric organ.  ‘It was explosively glorious,’ said Recla [that’s the seminary intern]. ‘People could not sit still; they were up yelling and screaming. The applause after each of the shows lasted 10-15 minutes.’”

The phenomenon was not limited to Gettysburg College.  Speaking of the production team, McGowan writes: “They sought to stage Superstar: first, however, they took action to close down a rash of unauthorized (or ‘bootleg’) concert performances which mushroomed across North America.”  And those lawsuits rubbed many the wrong way; Oz magazine took the position that it was a little deplorable to play so fast and loose with Jesus, commercialize it so much, and then sue other people who were trying to perform it.  McGowan defends the show; it IS a little weird to commercialize the Jesus story and then aggressively say that others can’t.  Either way, lots and lots of people are hearing the album and wanting to perform the whole thing live in some version of staging.

That is an impressive, grassroots, early sign that things are going well.  The album had come out, and independently of any publicity push or anything else, a group of college students heard the album, loved it, and figured out for themselves that this was something that could be performed as a musical, or at least as a “stripped-down, oratorio-style show” in the words of Kathryn Post.  The album, by itself, was enough to inspire fandom intense enough that Christian college students were adapting the album into something like a musical.

Then, of course, the show would open on Broadway.  Before talking about just what that production was like, I think it’s important that we trace what the show as about, and I’ll do this in ways a little more detailed than our past episodes.

I’ll paraphrase Sternfeld’s plot summary here, but it starts with Judas who just wants to know what the deal is with Jesus.  The push behind Jesus grows; the needy want healing, the opponents threaten his life, and “Jesus becomes somewhat disillusioned and tired.”  Now I’ll stop here and say that does not sound like the Son of God made flesh.  Humans get grumpy and tired, divine beings – even demons – don’t.  Or least they don’t get tired.  If Jesus is God and knows he’s God it is a very different take on what God is to say that he can get worn out and a little salty.  Then, “Judas does the only thing he feels will save both Jesus’ life and any hope of the message’s continuation: he tips off the priests.”  At the last supper “a tired an angry Jesus questions his own role in the story, his worth whether dead or alive, his God.  Judas hangs himself in an angry, grief-stricken haze; he loves Jesus, and he is tormented by the knowledge that Jesus seems not to understand his actions.”  Finally, “The story ends with crucifixtion; there is no resurrection in the score, although it can be implied to various degrees through staging.”

I’m gonna unpack some things here, because they will connect to some other themes.

Mostly, there are some plot holes here.  To paraphrase Walter Kolchak from the big Lebowski, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least they are not confused about the motives of Judas.  If the dude is just evil, we all know why he betrays Jesus.  But for this telling, I’ve got questions.  Why does turning Jesus over to the high priests save him from the Romans?  I don’t even get the thought, but there’s no doubt that it didn’t work.  The priests just gave him to Pilate who sent him back to the priests who sent him back to the Romans who then crucified him anyway.  And, if you think Jesus might be God, why aren’t you more worried about killing him wrongfully than hacking off the Romans?  Like, if he’s God, can’t he totally take down the Romans?  Shouldn’t you figure that out before you turn him in?

And even if he’s not God, just a run of the mill Jewish messiah and king like David and Solomon, isn’t most of the old testament a bunch of stories about how a human king with the backing of vengeful God take down a stronger military force?  Like, get some musicians, march around Jericho, and watch God tumble the walls down, or part the Red Sea, or send a pillar of fire to keep the forces at bay, or something?  If Judas believed all that, and there’s nothing in the show to suggest that he didn’t, then whether secular or divine Jesus as King of the Jews should wipe the desert floor with the Romans.

And that’s just the motivation of Judas.  Jesus seems to struggle with whether he is God.  I’m willing to suspend my disbelief pretty far for the sake of a show, but if you WERE, in fact, God, wouldn’t you know it?  There is certainly some struggle you can point to in some parts of the new testament where Jesus is conflicted about being crucified – and I do get that even if you were a God in human form it would be no fun to get crucified, or have your God turn their back on you – but there’s nothing to say that Jesus himself didn’t know if he was a God.  And if that’s even a question, doesn’t it take all the drama out of everything?  Why is Judas so conflicted over whether Jesus is God or human if even Jesus doesn’t know?  Bill Murray knew the answer to that question – Ghostbusters protocol is pretty simple; if someone asks are you a god, you say yes, I am a god.  But Jesus doesn’t do that in this show.  And if Jesus is telling you he’s not sure he’s God or not, and you’re his best friend, like the BFF disciple, why not make the logical point – if you’re not sure that you’re God, you’re probably not God (in your face, Ghostbusters) – rather than say, well, neither of us really know whether you’re God or not, so I’ll turn you over to the high priests because that’s better.

I see these as fairly significant plot holes, and I will say that they make it hard for me to really enjoy this show.  I’m less taken with the music or sets or performers or artistry, and I find myself constantly asking, “Why did he do that?”

Jessica Sternfeld is more forgiving.  She writes: “This is a largely character-driven show, one which spends its time examinging the thoughts and actions of its players and sketches events on in a general way.  As Joseph Swain points out, because the story is familiar, there is plenty of time for such close character development.”

The effort is clearly to play up the human side of Jesus if he is indeed God in human form.  Sternfeld quotes ALW as saying: “What we were trying to do is bring Christ home to people; to make Him more real, and bring Him down from the stained glass windows…In the opera He’s fallible, huma, never sure of himself, whether or not He is God.  He decides that He must die to attract more attention to His movement, which as gone as far as it can.”  She then quotes Tim Rice who adds, “whether God or not, he had human failings and fears, and these must have dominated his final days on earth.”

The relationship of all this to source material is quite loose.  One final quote here, and this is from Sternfeld: “Rice used the Bible as his source for organizing the events, but he relied more on thet book The Life of Christ by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen for the details of the Gospels.  He then proceeded to dismiss or alter many of those details, creating characters and events of his own.”

What I will say at this point is that many have observed that Webber and Rice denied taking a theological stance.  Post writes: “In interviews, Rice and Webber — both raised Anglican — said they were never trying to make a theological point about Judaism or Christianity. Their goal had been to craft a compelling show.”

I am just not sure you can do that.  “Let’s take Jesus down from the stained glass and make him more human” is definitely a theological choice.  I mean, the basic question of who and what was Jesus is pretty much the zero point of every major religious split.  It’s what separates the Jews and the Muslims from the Christians, the Gnostics from the Paulines, the Paulines from the Jerusalem church, and those are just the basics.

I mean, when the Christian church finally coalesced under Constantine that hardly ended the theological debates over who Jesus was, and here I’m just gonna quote the wikipeida entry on what happened at the first Council of Nicaea: “Arius criticized Alexander's teachings on Christology; Alexander taught that Jesus as God the Son was eternally generated from the Father, while Arius and his followers asserted that the Father alone was eternal, and that the Son was created or begotten by the Father, and thus had a defined point of origin and was subordinate to the Father.[15][16] Arius accused Alexander of following the teachings of Sabellius, who taught that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were one person, rather than the view held throughout the east that they were distinct.[17] Alexander called a local council of bishops from Egypt and Libya, which sided with Alexander's view. Arius refused to subscribe to the council's decision, and he and several followers were excommunicated and exiled from Alexandria by Alexander. Arius then traveled to churches around the Roman east and wrote to bishops to gain support of his view. Among Arius' supporters were Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea, and they advocated for his view and his restoration to the church in Alexandria. Alexander also circulated letters defending his own position.”

And that was before the internet.

Those details are fun but don’t really need focus.  The main point here is that taking a stance on who Jesus was isn’t really something that’s theologically neutral.  It’s kinda the whole ballgame.

So, summing up at our halfway point here: The album comes out first.  It clearly hits a chord with young Christians.  The story is character rather than plot driven, but characters have to make choices, and these choices leave plot holes.  It asks questions that it doesn’t really get around to answering, and the end is ambiguous as to whether Jesus is resurrected.  The one guy who does come back from death is Judas.  The creators are saying they want to make artistic choices for a good story and not make a theological point, and I’ll take them at their word, but their artistic choices didn’t really make much of a plot, and they are theological whether they want them to be or not.  And the big question will be how religious people react – will they see this as a validation of the youthful pro-Jesus movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, or will they be offended with the portrayal of Jesus as a put-out superstar who bears the toll of fame and attention rather than as the divine savior of all humanity?

Just to tease forward a little bit, in forthcoming episodes we’ll talk about how this stumbles bass-ackwards into a really profound set of theological and scholarly questions.

But for now, good music, bad plot, and more religion than the creators want to acknowledge.  Definitely an emphasis on the human side of Jesus and the sympathetic side of Judas.

We are now ready to open on Broadway, which will happen in October of 1971.  The male lead, sadly, no longer has any connection to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On the album, the Jesus part is sung by Ian Gillian who is the lead singer of the rock band Deep Purple.  “Smoke on the Water” is their song that I most recognize, but they are an established, national act. The stage production, however, had Jeff Fenhold playing Jesus.  

A few fun points about Fenholt; he got a degree from The School of Bible Theology University in San Jacinto, California.  But, remember that director O’Horgan?  He did some very cutting edge stuff, including having Fenholt covered with honey that other performers licked off “to bond with Jesus.”  But there was some massive drug use amongst the cast; McGowan reports a quote that says as they approached opening night “confidence, not to mention the cast, was high.”  New York magazine openly wondered if everyone involved was required to take LSD.  Fenholt was addicted to many things, tried his hand at a rock and roll career, had a bizarre sexual relationship with Gala Dali, wife of Salvador Dali, and even recorded some stuff with Black Sabbath that was never released.  That at least means he was more sober at the time than Ozzy Osborune was, but his struggles were real.  He would end life re-converting to Christianity after a Christinan stagehand confronted him about his portrayal of Jesus during the shoe.  He became an evangelist musician.  On the Trinity Broadcast Network he revealed that his parents had abused him, they responded by suing him and TBN, and dropped the case when he proved his claims were true.  

There are more and equally fascinating details; let’s just say that he was abused as a kid, got a Bible degree, played Jesus where he got hooked on drugs and booze, reconverted and became a scion of 80s and 90s religious broadcasting.  That is one tumultuous life for the original lead of JCS.

Ben Vereen played Judas; Yvonne Elliman played Mary Magdalene.  In the show, she’s portrayed as a sex worker, although Kathryn Post quotes Duke Professor of Religious Studies Mark Goodacre who says "It's one of the most disappointing things about the show in many ways, that it simply buys into the once-popular cliché but complete fallacy that Mary Magdalene is a sex worker."

Those are all elements of this show, but the most striking thing about the show as it opens is not the tumultuous future life of the male lead – I note in passing that Dee Snider, lead singer of Twisted Sister, also played the role of Christ in a production of JCS – but the spin put on the show by director Tom O’Horgan.  Let’s remember that O’Horgan had been an off-broadway guy who had directed Hair.  O’Horgan won the 1967 award for best off-off-broadway director and had to his credits a show called Futz which was quote “an absurdist parable about a farmer’s love for his pig.”  He had a bunch of trust exercises that are now common but were new at the time and many were a little creepy – McGowan says “Barbara Lee Horn has summarized as ‘extreme permissiveness based on exploratory improvisation’.”

The 1960s are, of course, reputed for their experimental, nontraditional, and open culture, and in the theater Hair becomes the embodiment of all that.  There’s no formal start to the show; the performers would be in character but might be sleeping in the aisles so you had to step over them to get to your seats, and in some cases when you got to your seat there would be an actor in it.  There is a famous nude scene; McGowan says that even the original cast thought it was going to far and it wasn’t clear that it was legal under New York statute.  There are more details on the matter, but the actors were not required to disrobe but got paid $10 extra if they did.  O’Horgan was very serious about shaking things up; he is quoted as saying “I took this assignment because I feel Hair is an assault on the theatrical dead end: Broadway. It’s almost an effort to give Broadway mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”  And for Hair, that worked, and it probably even layed the groundwork for JCS.

Neither Jessica Sternfeld or ALW thinks it worked for JCS.  The show is about Jesus and it’s written by 2 fairly conservative Anglicans in ALW and Rice.  It does have a very different take on the traditional story, but they don’t necessarily conceive of it as genre-busting theater.  But O’Horgan can’t see any script as anything else.  

O’Horgan demanded and received total creative control.  At this point the Rice-ALW pair were mid-twenties somethings looking for their big break, and O’Horgan had what was the most exciting broadway production to his credit.  He got billing equal to the authors and a write-up in the program that strained the edges of truth but really made him look good.

His choices were, um, bold.  The sets were huge and moving.  One fun fact is that because it used amplified music it was one of the first show to use those smaller microphones that everyone uses now.  They had to use handheld mics due to the experimental nature of the tech for some shows, and they even had to cancel some previews because they’d pick up the taxi walkie-talkie noise.  Other choices would not go so well.  I’ll turn it over to Jessica Sternfeld:

“Critics were more than disturbed by what they were seeing, because it was nonsensical and weird and because it obliterated the score. The stage, for example, instead of a curtain, sported a wall with wavy lines that were meant to look like muscle tissue.89 As the show began, the wall tilted backward and became the floor. Throughout the story, Judas had four tormentors, meant to be his conscience, men in puffy suits that danced about him silently. As Judas’s opening number ended, Jesus rose up through a hole in the floor in a huge silver goblet, wearing a beaded cape. Copyright © 2006. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Caiaphas and the other priests entered from above, riding on a flying bridge made out of large white animal bones. This was meant to represent their “feeding off the carcass of mankind.”90 In “Hosanna,” instead of carrying palm fronds, the crowd carried cymbals, plastic tambourines, fish, enormous protozoa-like creatures, representations of the man in the moon, strings of beads hanging from poles, boulders, and a gigantic set of false teeth. Pilate, in a distinctly non-O’Horgan-like moment, sang his dream on a bare stage in one spotlight. But by the second act, things were back to “normal”: banners hung in front of the stage in place of a curtain (or wall), which depicted a see-through Jesus, muscles and organs visible, doing a headstand. These banners became the canopy over the last supper scene. During “Gethsemane,” Jesus stood in front of a large box which contained twinkling lights meant to represent stars, referred to by O’Horgan as the “universe box.”91

Pilate’s residence featured a huge sculpture of the head of Caesar, the forehead of which rose to reveal two extra sets of eyes. Herod, not to be outdone, entered while lounging inside a giant hollowed-out dragon’s head. And he was, infamously, in full transvestite gear: “ornamental tiara, six-inch platform shoes, long dangling pearls for earrings, necklace, and a heavily painted face with elongated, polished fingernails.”92 Judas, preparing to die, surrounded by his now-frantic puffy tormentors, had a whole host of ropes from which to choose his noose. He chose one, it pulled him up to the flyspace, and from there the audience lost sight of him but heard his neck snap. During the thirty-nine lashes, soldiers carried Pilate around the stage, as he counted into a large horn or perhaps an elephant’s trunk, with a red tongue lolling out its wrong end. Judas later returned from the dead in a silver lame´ bikini, descending from above on a huge stained glass butterfly. His backup singers wore gold sequined gowns and frosted afro wigs. Crowning the spectacle was a moment rife with O’Horgan’s favorite scenic device: things that completely transformed before the audience’s eyes. For the crucifixion, Jesus rose up through the floor hidden inside a cocoon-like pod, which the chorus pulled apart in layers. Judas lowered a crown of thorns onto Jesus’ head. The cast pulled ropes that caused the pod to be replaced with layers upon layers of robes, until eventually Jesus was wearing a hundred yards of gold lame ´ which tumbled from his perch fifteen feet in the air to cover the stage floor. The chorus covered this stage picture with another large banner, through which Jesus, now wearing only a loincloth, flew forward. He hung, crucified, not on a cross but on a golden inverted triangle, which eventually fell away, leaving him suspended in flames. The critics had a great deal with which to work, to say the least.93

It may not surprise you to hear that the critics were not taken with all of these choices.  Back to Sternfeld:

Walter

Kerr, second theater critic for the Times, was significantly less calm in his assessment (and Barnes had been only semi-calm). He paved the way for the collective fit that most critics joined. A fan of the album, he was disappointed to glimpse only a bit of it “through the hallucinatory gyrations onstage.”95 Instead of keeping it simple and allowing the text to be clear and the message clean, as he should have done, O’Horgan adorned it: “Oh, my God, how he has adorned it.” Jesus, rising in his chalice at the beginning, reminded Kerr of “Dolores in the Ziegfield Follies of 1924.”Later Jesus was dragged offstage “on what seems a large slice of eggplant.” Judas’s tormentors, “loin-clothed creepy-crawlers,”served only to announce O’Horgan’s presence in the theater. Kerr was puzzled by the false teeth, the cornucopia with a lizard’s tongue hanging out of it, a set of giant caterpillars which are covered by fog “before they have acquired any conceivable significance,” and, worst of all, the crucifixion, which “is Death in 3-D.”

There’s more!  Time magazine wrote an article where “The oddities were listed: the layered robe that cost $20,000, the bone bridge, the six-eyed Caesar head through which Pilate enters, the box of lights which might be God, or a computer, or “the ark of the covenant as crafted by Magnavox.”

John Simon of New York magazine, who liked to trash shows more than most, had this to say: “Twice during the Gethsemane song, there is lowered over Christ’s head what looks like a huge box of candy in translucent wrapping, which, according to Clive Barnes, represents the stars over Gethsemane, though I would have sworn it was the bonbons over Gethsemane. (My date claimed it symbolized the squareness of God.)”

Just one more.  Again quoting Sternfeld: “Jack Kroll of Newsweek, like most, took delight in listing O’Horgan’s odd symbols, such as Jesus appearing like a “deus ex Dixie Cup” in his chalice, and his layers of robes that peeled off like an “auto-erotic silver artichoke.”99”

The unimpressed included Lloyd-Webber.  McGowan writes: “Lloyd Webber detested O’Horgan’s ‘brash and vulgar’ production. His contempt remained undimmed three decades later. The opening of the first musical on Broadway by an ‘unknown’ 23 year-old British man ‘should have been the happiest night of my life’. Instead, he watched ‘a mountain of kitsch that looked like a monument to a demented pastry chef’. One of the ‘few positive outcomes’ of that night was his resolution that ‘when I got my first opportunity I would start my own production company’. He remained convinced that ‘the biggest selling double-album of all time ran in its first theatre incarnation a mere 20 months’ because ‘never … was so wrong a production mounted of my work’.”

All accounts have it that Tim Rice was a little less unhappy, although it’s unclear if he was just less willing to trash his own production in the press.  Sternfeld makes the point that there were some critics who much approved of what O’Horgan had done, but they were a decisive minority.

We will dive much more deeply into the critical reaction in the next episode, but the overall thrust is that most critics got what Rice and ALW were trying to do and reacted accordingly, but it was hard to see anything past O’Horgan’s staging.  Sternfeld says that all the critics loved Ben Vereen as Judas, Barry Denned as Pilate, and Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene.  The reaction to Fenholt was far less positive, with the general feeling that he could sing but not act, although some of that may have been to O’Horgan’s decision to have him play the role as limping and whiny.

The presales had been strong, but the reviews knocked the popularity down after the presales ran out, and the show closed after 20 months.  It got five Tony nominations and didn’t win any of them, although one of those was for best set design, so there were evidently some fairly generous nominators that year.  The show did go on tour, and over ALWs objections O’Horgan was still allowed to direct the Los Angeles version.  By 1972 it was touring internationally in Australia, France, and Scandanavia, and finally came back home to London in August of 1972.

The original producer was Robert Stigwood, who had been vital to the role and brought on O’Horgan, but knew that the out-there style of O’Horgan wouldn’t fly in the more stoic fields of London, used a contractual loophole to hire someone else, and landed on Jim Sharman who had directed the Australian version.  The version was altogether less glitzy and more accessible, the critics generally liked it, the audience adored it, and it ran for what was then an unprecedented 8 years.  No small part of the reaction was some British national pride in the ability to produce a good musical, and that theme showed up in more than a couple of reviews.

From there, the show was made into a film that released in 1973, which was shot in the middle east.  There were some protests we’ll talk about in the next episode, but generally while some people liked it the film never really had the impact of the musical or the album.

For McGowan, Superstar takes a place of pride among rock operas.  In his view, Hair is the prototype for rock operas.  Godspell is the first staged, scripture-based example, and they both lead the way to Tommy by the Who, where the lead character can be seen as loosely parallel to Christ and where rock music is kind of the whole point.  But here’s what he really thinks: “Tommy might be the definitive Rock Opera, but Superstar (as it is commonly called by its writers and performers) best merits both halves of the genre’s name. It combines the heavy, blues-inflected rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s with a full orchestra, and makes considerable vocal demands of its cast. It has the most sophisticated, thoroughly developed musical score and the most coherent

dramatic narrative; the latter expressed entirely through sung, not spoken, dialogue. Superstar is the apotheosis of Rock Opera.”

For Sternfeld: “Thanks to Superstar, in its embodiments as concept album, Broadway musical, and film, there would be no forgetting Lloyd Webber and Rice now. The young team had arrived, and would now be faced with the daunting task of proving themselves and their staying power. No flash in the pan, they would impress again with their next work, and the one after that. With the experience of Superstar behind them, they knew how to mount a show, and they had learned about directors, staging, money, albums, ticket sales, critics, and public relations. More important, the megamusical had arrived. Its first outing as embodied by Jesus Christ Superstar had been full of hits and misses, and the “mega” quality provided by O’Horgan had been a disastrous miss, but the concept was now in place. 

And that will do it for this episode.  Two youngsters hit it off, started with some schoolhouse productions, and turned a good single into a megahit album that became the musical that would launch them both, becoming both the archetypical rock musical and ushering the era of the megamusical on broadway.  Along the way, they had to tap dance through some important creative choices and make some plot decisions that couldn’t help but be theological.

But, it’s not yet entirely clear what made this musical work, and why it became the vehicle that launched the careers of Rice and ALW and transformed broadway forever.  What was it about this show that hit the right nerve?  Did it ride the wave of young-person, pro-Jesus popularity that unexpectedly sprung from the hippie generation?  Since there is no such thing as bad publicity, did it successfully goad conservative Christians and Jews to spark a controversy that could only help ticket sales?  Was it brilliantly acted and performed?  Is the plot compelling?  Was the world ready for the Jesus story from a new perspective?  All those ideas have been advanced as possible reasons that the show made it’s mark, and we’ll work through all of them and a couple more in our next episode of THM.