How did people react to Superstar, a story about Jesus from Judas' perspective? -- Jesus Christ Superstar (4 of 5; Episode 27)

There is a new musical about to open, and boldly it declares that it will re-tell the story of the crucifixion, and do so from the perspective of…Judas.  The advanced publicity is massive – as will become a hallmark of the coming age of megamusicals – and the theme of the show has not escaped notice.  No less an evangelical figure than Billy Graham himself said the show was “bordering on blasphemy and sacrilege.”

His concern about the content is shared.  In a rare moment of agreement between Graham and the National Secular Society, both groups showed up to protest the opening of the show.  The Secular Society handed out leaflets entitled ‘Jesus Christ Supersham.’  The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee also responded … rather strongly … to the show.

Ted Neely, who has played the lead role of Jesus in scores of productions, looked back at the role when he had passed his 80th year.  He “by the controversy the show stirred up.  "I gotta tell you, it was very strange," he told Tapestry.  "Our production company said, no matter what they may say to you, don't say anything, because they might punch you right in the face. So we were silent."

But the show would not be.  Would the controversy shut the show down?  Would protestors block the doors?  Or would the show simply go on?  We’ll talk about how the audiences, the critics, and the world reacted to the opening of Jesus Christ Superstar in this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

Transcript

Jesus Christ Superstar, episode 4.  Audience and critical reaction.

There is a new musical about to open, and boldly it declares that it will re-tell the story of the crucifixion, and do so from the perspective of…Judas.  The advanced publicity is massive – as will become a hallmark of the coming age of megamusicals – and the theme of the show has not escaped notice.  No less an evangelical figure than Billy Graham himself said the show was “bordering on blasphemy and sacrilege.”

His concern about the content is shared.  In a rare moment of agreement between Graham and the National Secular Society, both groups showed up to protest the opening of the show.  The Secular Society handed out leaflets entitled ‘Jesus Christ Supersham.’  The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee also responded … rather strongly … to the show.

Ted Neely, who has played the lead role of Jesus in scores of productions, looked back at the role when he had passed his 80th year.  He “by the controversy the show stirred up.  "I gotta tell you, it was very strange," he told Tapestry.  "Our production company said, no matter what they may say to you, don't say anything, because they might punch you right in the face. So we were silent."

But the show would not be.  Would the controversy shut the show down?  Would protestors block the doors?  Or would the show simply go on?  We’ll talk about how the audiences, the critics, and the world reacted to the opening of Jesus Christ Superstar in this episode of THM.

[Intro here]

Before we dive in, just a quick plea for your help in keeping this show going.  This is now a standard part of this podcast and every other one, but this is a medium where audience involvement makes or breaks you.  There are very few shows that have any sort of advertisting budget, and God Bless this postmodern, I am actually quite happy to say that in this age of social media bots and artificial intelligence, podcast audiences mostly trust each other.  Your short involvement as a real human being can make a big difference to this real human being, and if you can take a moment to give the show a rating, take an episode you find interesting and drop the link on your own social media feed, these are the things that will really make a difference.  And as always, thank you for dropping in to listen.  I really do work hard to make sure that there’s stuff here worth listening to that you can’t get anywhere else.

We are at the fourth episode covering JCS; the first two dealt with the issues involved in interpreting the Bible and the Judas story in particular, and the last episode traced the development of the show from the first time Tim Rice met ALW until the show was first performed on Broadway and when it then opened on London.  Today, we’ll talk about how that show was received, and as always, try to figure out what it was that made the show work and what the show has to say about theater and life.

There are at least three key elements that go into the was audiences and critics reacted to this show.  To recap some of what we already covered in the past 3 episodes, but that will be relevant here, JCS is a “proto-megamusical.”  That is, when we now think of Broadway smash hits we think of things like Cats or Les Miz that run for decades and make, literally, billions of dollars.  It is worth mentioning that the entire phenomenon is strongly linked to ALW and to only a slightly lesser extent the ALW-Tim Rice team.

But none of that was in place in the early 1970s when the show first came out.  There wasn’t really such a thing as a mega-musical yet and ALW was yet the ALW who many complain, rightly or wrongly, is now virtually critic-proof.  JCS is a show that is going to have to win over audiences, and to a roughly equal extent the critics.  The big show at that point was Hair, which was directed by Tom O’Horgan, and it was a plot-light exploration of hippie culture.  It was succeeding by pushing the boundaries of how you rehearsed, how the actors related to each other, how far you could push the 4th wall, how many totally nude actors you could put on the stage and still not violate public decency laws, and wrap it all around some very innovating music.  The world was moving from Lawrence Welk to the Beatles, and Hair was at the cutting edge of how new rock-oriented musical styles were going to play out on Broadway.

So to set the stage, ALW and Tim Rice are the new kids, O’Horgan as the director of Hair is the established guy with Broadway chops, and the genre of mega-musical is in its earliest stages.  So back to our three key elements that define how the show will be received.  First, it is about Judas and Jesus, which makes it a religious show, and that is just not possible to avoid.  The world comes to the crucifixion story with some pretty strongly held opinions and preconceived notions, and that will impact the reaction to the show.  Second, the show is based on a hugely successful musical album, and that has never been done before.  There have been cast recordings, but nobody has used a pop music release as the vehicle to launch a musical theater production before.  And third, there is the question of how the hippy-style, avante-guard directing of Tom O’Horgan is going to mesh with the religious themes and the ideas of Rice and Lloyd-Webber.  So let’s take those in order, and start with the religion question.

The first thing to quickly dispense with is that the creators insisted that they weren’t making a religious statement and that telling the crucifixion story from the perspective of Judas was just a creative choice.  We talked about this in the prior episode, where you can find the footnotes, but this isn’t really something to take seriously.  You can’t really say that the Book of Mormon isn’t really about missionaries, it’s just a creative choice.  You can’t write a comic book with a bunch of pictures of Mohammed and say that it’s just a creative choice, or write something called the Satanic Verses and say that you aren’t saying something about Islam so it’s all cool.  Without rehashing too much, the show does have to say something about who Judas is, and inherent in that is saying something about who Jesus is.  And the Jesus in this story is much different from how He is commonly understood by Christians – he’s much more indecisive, might not be divine, and in the show isn’t necessarily even resurrected.  The show kind of ends with Judas still wondering if Jesus is a divine entity, and the show doesn’t really answer the question.  But that stance – Jesus might or not might not divine, and the part of him that was human predominated the final days of his life – definitely fits neatly with some theologies and rather flagrantly clashes with others.  Like it or not, if you write a play about Judas and Jesus, and you take the conceit of portraying what they were thinking as the events played out, you are making a theological statement and are going to get a reaction from religious adherents.

So amongst the Christians, there are at least two possible reactions, and they are opposites.  The first possible reaction is that they are going to love the show because it thrusts the Jesus story back into public attention.  True to its title, in a world where pop culture and entertainment have basically displaced the universal Catholic church as the center of cultural life and thought, making Jesus a superstar gives Him a new relevance to a world that is dominated by what is now called the attention economy – power, prominence, political attention, and cultural direction are all dependent on how well you can capture and hold the attention of the mass public.  It used to be that all a Pope had to do was release a statement or encyclical or speech, and if it was the 15th century that was so central to everything that was basically all a Pope had to do.  But if you wanted to effect culture in the 1960s, well, Elvis Presley or John Lennon might have more sway over young minds than Pope Paul the 6th.

So one view was that as the 1960s were bringing in a new, energetic, and youthful infusion of ideas into everything, the same thing was happening in modern Christianity, and especially the various evangelically-oriented protestant movements.  There was reason to suspect that those of this ilk would take to the show.  Our old friend Jessica Sternfeld, now of Chapman University and author of the book titled Megamusical, which has basically become the Bible for this podcast so far, wrote this: 

Jesus, it seemed, was in fashion. In popular music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, references to Jesus and to religion in general were becoming increasingly frequent. Oft-cited examples of this spiritual “Jesus Rock” movement include the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Neil Diamond’s version of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”15 These singles dealt with the idea of brotherhood and a general spirituality. More specific examples of “Jesus Rock” abounded in songs like “Remember Bethlehem,” ”Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up,” and “Jesus Is Just Alright.”Time magazine pointed out that Jesus could be found not only in pop music but on all sorts of merchandise like bathing suits and wristwatches; he was a fad among America’s youth.17 For some more liberal-minded churches, this was a boon, as they drew new worshippers by incorporating popular music into their services and classes. 

Kathryn Post, writing for the National Catholic review, had a similar take: “The album arrived just as Christian rock was beginning to emerge in the U.S. — Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" was a chart-topper in 1970, and the Jesus People's Movement was blending the electric sounds of 1960s-counterculture with evangelicalism.”

John Dart, writing for the LA Times in 1973, noted that both a US Catholic newsletter and a publication called the Christian Century, both liked the show.  As we talked about in the last episode and will recap in a minute, there’s no way you can say that the JCS story is true to the Biblical story of the crucifixion, so these reviews don’t so much like that it’s a faithful retelling of a gospel story so much as it’s a telling of the gospel story that’s kind of a big deal.  It made the cover of Time magazine, who did not review it very positively, but it made the Jesus story a big enough deal that it was front and center of American culture.

One connection I find especially tasty comes from Larry Norma, and early Christian rocker.  So into the 70s and 80s rock music was taking on its defining edge, with electric guitars and Jimi Hendrix-Jimi Page style solos.  Bob Dylan would famously convert to Christianity – sort of – and he was a huge cultural influence on everything.  In fact, those guitar-using worship services that are now ubiquitous in protestant, Catholic, and Jewish circles all can draw a pretty straight line to Dylan.  Usually there’s a single singer with an acoustic guitar playing 3- or 4-chord songs qua Dylan.  For those musicians who were into the music by, like Dylan, had collapsed out of the free love, drug-heavy culture and embraced Christianty as a faith and lifestyle alternative, the idea was to play rock music but with Christian lyrics.

And Larry Norman was very influential in this movement; he kind of sang like Neil Young, wore all black like Johnny Cash, and like Dylan himself played an upbeat brand of rock music with electric guitars.  So in 1966 John Lennon famously commented that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, a statement for which he issued a public apology but could never really live down.

So in 1973, Norma released a song called “Only visiting this planet” where he laments about the state of rock, including Bowie, Alice Cooper, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.  Right in the middle of the song he dropped this couplet: “This time last year, people didn’t wanna hear, they looked at Jesus from afar, this year he’s a superstar.”  And then, dropping into his purest Johnny Cash sing-talk, adds this: “Dear John, who’s more popular now?”

That anecdote, I think, fairly captures the “JCS capitalizes on a new Jesus popularity” side of the reaction.  Some will feel that there is a rising “Jesus market” that entertainers can tap into, and this anticipates that the reaction will be positive in a way that will, perhaps cynically, boost the commercial success of the show.

The exact opposite view, of course, is that the show will offend Christians because it’s not true to the gospel and has what might be a heretical view of Jesus.  This should stimulate protest, get the show banned, and hurt its commercial success.

I will indulge a quick look forward and back at this.  Looking back, in previous episodes we learned that it really isn’t possible to tell a crucifixton story that is true to the gospels.  First, translating any Biblical text exactly isn’t even possible; there are many, many ambiguities and many, many different translations.  There are no surviving copies of any new testament book in the hand of the reputed original author, and so all we have are translations of translations that are copies of copies.  This might give an artist fairly free license to expand the text.  Second, the gospels themselves are contradictory.  In some accounts Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss; in others, Jesus just turns himself in.  In some accounts Judas hangs himself, in others he explodes.  In some gospels he returns the silver coins and the priests buy a field that is cursed, and other gospels Judas buys the field, then kills himself, and then the field is cursed.

And if nothing else, the crucifixation story plays out in many different books and not as a single narrative, and so if you are going to dramatize it, whether it be Godspell or Willem Dafoe in the Last Temptation of Christ, you are going to have to make some creative choices just to get the thing from the Bible to a stage or screen.  Every attempt to make a Jesus movie – and there are lots of them – are going to have to do this.  Ian Mills of Hamilton College put it this way: “Every cinematic Jesus combines and conflates the gospels into a single, streamlined story; Superstar is no exception.”

But even against that backdrop, JCS took some liberties.  As we discussed in the last episode, Tim Rice took the Bible as a starting place, used a book written by a Bishop to help him interpret it, and then just went rogue to do whatever he thought would work.  Mark Goodacre,  who boasts affiliations at both University of Birmingham and Duke put it this way: “Jesus Christ Superstar harmonizes events from different Gospels in a way breathtaking to any biblical scholar with sensitivities to the synoptic problem” and later “like most other Jesus films, Jesus Christ Superstar has its fair share of historical implausibilities and even errors.”  Goodacre is talking about the movie, of course, but those errors and implausibilities he’s talking about are just as evident in the original musical.

And looking forward a little bit, in our next episode we will explore one of the more mind-blowing connections I can imagine between the musical and ancient archeology.  The choices Tim Rice made for the show are so eerily prescient of an ancient text discovered decades after the show came out that it does make you wonder if there isn’t some supernatural hand guiding all of this after all.  But let’s just say that the particular connection is not one that was going to make the Vatican, or the Anglican church, or even the Trinity Broadcast Network very happy.

JCS is a story of Christ, but it does question the divinity of Christ, for good and bad reasons it strays considerably from the stories in the gospels, and the final vision of Judas and Jesus it puts forward does probably hit the goal of “humanizing” both figures but in a religious tradition built around the divine, rather than human, side of Jesus, the story seems more of a challenge to mainstream Christianity than an affirmation of it.

So if a mainstream Christian theology is important to you, there is plenty in this show to be unhappy about.  And there were, indeed, unhappy Christians.

According to Kathryn Post, the BBC banned the 1970 concept album for being sacreligious.  The ban was partially successful – the album eventually sold something like 40,000 copies in the UK, but it’s popularity really exploded elsewhere.  Antipathy was not limited to the BBC “Christians bristled at the show's depiction of romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, its choice of Judas as narrator and its lack of resurrection. Billy Graham said the show "bordered on blasphemy," and in a 2021 interview, Ted Neeley, the original understudy for the Jesus role on Broadway, said, ‘Every single performance was protested by people calling it sacrilegious. They would try to keep us from going in the stage door."”  The protests may have been immediate and persistent, but Sternfeld has this take on it: “On the day the show opened, protest began. Outside the theater a group of rather disorganized picketers held signs that crossed out the “Superstar” of the show’s title and replaced it with phrases affirming Jesus’ divinity, such as “Lamb of God.””

Ian Mills opened his 2023 article this way: “In 1973, my grandfather organized churches across the Midwest to protest the arrival of Jesus Christ Superstar in local movie theaters. He urged his city council to ban the film. Fifty-years later, I assign the musical in New Testament courses.”

There was a definitely a second sort of religious reaction, one that did not, as Larry Norma did, see the show as a welcome publicity wave for Jesus, but viewed it as sacrilegious enough that it should be shut down.

But Sternfeld reports that, whether or not the religious groups liked it, the critics – who would have a lot to say about other parts of the show – totally understood that it was a retelling of the crucifixion from the perspective of Judas, and they were generally either fine with that or liked the choice.  It was something that made the story fresh, at least to them, and provided an interesting take.

The third group that took issue with the show were active Jewish groups.  Sternfeld can give us the details:

Only one group mounted a calculated, organized protest. The American Jewish Committee, with backing from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, released a statement which spelled out their concerns: the show “unambiguously lays the primary responsibility for Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion to the Jewish priesthood. The priests are portrayed as hideously inhuman and satanically evil: contemptuous, callous and bloodthirsty.”56 The AJC made it clear that censorship was not their goal, nor was any implication of antisemitism, but they felt obligated to speak out against a show that could have damaging effects on America’s freethinking and impressionable youth. The musical “is at the center of the creation of a set of cultural images in the counterculture of America. It is the creation of a religious counterculture.”57 With Caiaphas and Annas as unmistakable villains, the AJC felt that both the New Testament and more modern interpretations of Jews’ role in the event had been dismissed in favor of a view similar to centuries-old passion plays. 

We have talked about the passion plays in the past episodes, but there prominent middle ages plays that very unambiguously placed blame for the death of Jesus on Judas specifically and the Jews collectively, and they more or less justified a mini-krystallnact in every city they played in and on every Easter.  I am not exaggerating here – the plays took on the flavor of a soccer-style pep rally for the citizens of each city to rampage through Jewish villages intent on wielding out personal beatings and property destruction and there were, every year, deaths amongst the Jewish population.  A show that calls back to that goes more than a little beyond what we now call “problematic.”

There is no doubt that the portrayal of the high priests in the show creates issues.  Ian Mills, who you’ll remember as the guy with the grandfather who protested the show but teaches in his class, approaches the material this way: “Superstar’s caricature of Jewish leaders is so overt that it provides a reference point for class discussions about problematic representations of Judaism. Criticizing Superstar helps students build a vocabulary for identifying related tropes and rhetoric in early Christian literature.“

And John Dart, writing for the LA Times in 1973, said: “The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council scored it as a ‘singularly damaging setback in the struggle against the religious sources of anti-Semitism.”

And finally, and as noted by Ian Mills, the show also is a callback to the earliest church maneuvers to minimize the guilt of the Romans.  Again, Pontius Pilate gets a pass although he could have stopped Jesus’ death, and although it is Pilate who has the final call, Roman soldiers who arrest Jesus, and the state of Rome that crucifies him, it is the Jewish high priests who are portrayed as the villains.  

And the timing was especially poignant.  As we have discussed in previous episodes, some especially antisemetic clerics in the early church wrote “deicide” into church doctrine.  The words weren’t explicit but the concept wasn’t hard to figure out, and it wasn’t until the mid 1960s – or two decades after the holocaust – that the Catholic church officially repudiated the notion that Jews were collectively to blame for the death of Jesus.  So for a show to come out in the early 1970s with some passion play callbacks was especially disturbing.

I will say that, as a counterpoint to all that, Judas is portrayed much more sympathetically than he is in most tellings.  And, sort of refreshingly, all the disciplines and Mary Magdalene are just portrayed as Jewish in a way that’s normal and, in a historically accurate way, shows the original of the Jesus movement in the first century as deeply rooted in Judaism in a way that none of the players see as problematic.  The reaction of the AJC seems very mature and balanced in this regard; unlike the Christians, they weren’t calling for censorship, and instead wanted a dialogue about Jewish identity that was more inclusive and affirming.

In the end, I will say, that as the scales tip the majority of the scholars that I have read do conclude that there are indefensible strains of antisemitism woven into the show.  The majority do conclude they should be a jumping off point for what we academics call “interrogation” or maybe “critiques” of racism in general and portrayal of Jewish people in particular.

As a brief insert here I should also say that there was some objection to Judas being played by a black man.  But that man was Ben Vereen and almost everyone who saw the show thought he was awesome so that strain of concern was pretty cursory.

There was more to this whole landscape than I have touched on here, but a useful grouping of the religious reaction was that there were some new-wave Christians who embraces the show as giving Jesus more cultural relevance, some more old-school Christians who protested the show because it ran contrary to some foundational, traditional Christian beliefs, and Jewish groups who were dismayed that the show seemed to dredge up some of the worst stereotypes history had conjured right at a time when progress on the specific question of Jesus’ death was being made.

Like I said, if religious beliefs are important to you, there were elements of the show that were going to kindle a conflict.  So the first thing that is going to play a role in the reaction to the show is its religious content.

The second thing is going to be the music.  I’m mostly recapping here, and as I said earlier the show was immediately preceded by the most successful double-album of all time.  A full-length, two-disc album came out in 1970 and it would out-sell Seargent Pepper by the Beatles.  As detailed in previous episodes, among the millions who loved the album were a host of performing groups who immediately saw its potential as a staged production, even before it came out on Broadway, and a major challenge to the production team was that scores of bootleg performances were popping up all over.  Some were just concerts, some had lighter staging, and we talked about one show at a place called Gettysburg College that packed the rafters but had to run as a no-charge, “dress rehearsal” performance due to legal issues.  And as I mentioned earlier, this was a big deal because the plan for Rice and ALW all along was to use the album as a vehicle to get the stage show produced, and that was working really well and had never been done before.

That meant that a lot of the reaction to the stage show was going to be how well it fit with the already successful album.  Back to Jessica Sternfeld:

“Alan Rich, lively arts critic for New York magazine, had disliked the album intensely and was not at all inclined to change his mind now. O’Horgan’s staging just made it worse.81 John Simon, theater critic for New York, had also not liked the album, and had the same reaction as Rich: staging did it no good.82 Richard Watts of the New York Post agreed: he found the score fine, if dull, but found the live version “flat, pallid, and actually pointless.”83 Most critics, however, had liked the album and enjoyed the music in the show, but were distracted by the staging, which led to mixed reviews; the Village Voice, among others, falls into this category.”

So, if you hated the album you probably hated the show, if you liked the album you probably like the show, and if you liked the album and wanted to like the show but were put off by the staging, you still liked the album and wished the show had been staged better.  Or at least less weirdly.  And most people fell in this category – they liked the music but not the staging.

Which gets us to the third main reaction to the show, how weird the staging was.  This we covered extensively in the last episode, but let me remind everyone of a few key phrases: fish, man in the moon, stay-puffed-marshmellow man, gigantic false teeth.

Marshmellow men, you ask?  Why yes, they were supposed to represent guilt and they danced around Judas a lot, but also Jesus.  Suffice it to say that not all audience members made the connection between the puffy dancers and the emotion of guilt.

The fish and the gigantic false teeth were part of what the cheering crowds waved at Jesus, not your more traditional palm fronds and whatnot, and I have read many things and even tried to hone my google searches to figure out what was up with the false teeth, but all I can say is they were definitely there, the critics definitely noticed them, but I’m not sure what they had to do with show. 

The most unfortunate thing was that all the over-the-top staging overshadowed any critical attention to the music: “Most reviews demonstrated a massive but probably unavoidable imbalance: a great deal of space was devoted toward O’Horgan’s monstrosities, leaving less for Lloyd Webber and Rice. The existence of the album, the controversy over the material, and the publicity caused by the protests meant that in the end, far less than usual was said about the music.”

So let’s pause and take stock of what actually happened to the show.  There were objections by religious groups, but as a historical fact those didn’t seem to shut the show down.  From Sternfeld “The protest garnered much attention in the press but did not rally any other Jewish groups, nor did it result in any changes to the show.”  The same could be said of the Christian objections.  And the passion story from the perspective of Judas didn’t really bother the critics.  

[sarcasm] As a communication scholar, I would hate to suggest that the media sometimes gloms on to controversy and negatives to create the appearance of conflict when it’s mostly a creature of their own creation – like, that never happens, except for all the time, and the internet is making that much, much worse – but something like that does appear to have happened here.  My take is that the real Bible scholars didn’t get too upset because they realized how hard it is to say you know the Judas story in the first place, the religious groups were themselves split between those who loved the attention and those who didn’t like the story, and to the critics the Judas perspective is kind of a net positive and the whole thing mattered a lot less than crazy staging and the great music.

But that staging was something that was generating a huge net negative for the press reviews, so the show did fine for its 8 months of advanced sales, and after that point the reviews dampened enthusiasm for the production, it closed in 20 months (which is still not too bad), and then it returned to London where the staging was toned way down and the show became the icon that it is today.

So that’s what DID happen in reaction to the show and it’s themes.  But there is a related question of what SHOULD have happened, and there are more details to dive into.  Here I will turn to James Huffman, who is writing in the Journal of Popular Culture in 1972, so right around the time the show is running in New York and a year before Larry Norman is mocking John Lennon.  Anyway, it’s right at the time of the show’s release, and I gotta say I am very taken with the way Huffman approaches the reaction to the show.  Not to go all meta on you and everything, but Huffman is writing a critique of theater critics, and he’s got some good points to make.

His article starts with a quote from Dan Morgenstern, a reviewer for a publication called Downbeat, written in 1971, and it reads, “Is Superstart a cynical attempt to cash in on the current ‘counterculture’ trend toward religiosity?”  That is our first explanation in this episode, and that shows that it was a pressing question at the time.  Huffman then very quickly connects this to a pattern – what happens when you are a critic and you review something that you hate but that the public obviously has a taste for?  Well, points out Huffman, you tend to think that a gullible public has been duped by a charlatan who doesn’t understand true art the way the critic does.  Huffman uses the word “misanthrope.”

But before we bash these critics too hard, let me just say that this is a common thought.  Wherever you are right now, look into a mirror.  Look yourself in the eye, and be honest: What do you really think of the Spice Girls?  Or, if you are of my generation, Nickelback?  The painting “Black Fire 1” by Barnett Newman is basically a canvas painted black on one side and beige on the other, with a vertical black line on the beige side.  It sold for $84 million.  Does that strike you as weird?  Or have you ever voted for a political candidate who lost and wondered how on earth 51% of the voters could be so stupid that they voted for that other guy?  Part of the reason the thought is so appealing to a critic is that we all have that thought at one time or another.  Or, as we have learned from the musical careers of Donnie and Marie Osmond, there are acts that were once popular that, in hindsight, have lost their shine.  Don’t ask me how much I paid for my pet rock in the 3rd grade.

And maybe that means there wasn’t that much there in the first place, which has to mean that there was a time when what was popular was also crap.  And if you’re a critic, it just might be your job to call that out earlier than others.

But Huffman is does not like this trend.  “But all too many popular critics continue to hack away at popular artists as though they were totally dead wood, and fret much more about the hallowed keeping of the public taste and morals than perform more valuable critical tasks of analyses and judgment.” 

And what Huffman does that I like so much is to look up the information and compare it to the reaction to see if it can be true.  Is JCS popular because it panders to a new Jesus youth movement?  Well, one way to know the answer is to see who it was that was buying all those tickets.  Huffman writes: “…young people’s reactions vary a great deal, just as their new votes do: the super-faithful consider Superstar blasphemous and perverted; “others feel it raises the right questions but doesn’t provide any of the answers”; some think it’s fairly good, some think it’s great. Perhaps the only common denominator is that most think it’s worth listening- to at least once-which brings us back to our starting point. The Jesus Movements seem to have little to do with Superstar directly, though the religious revival they represent may have some vague general influence which helps make this the “right moment” for the work. Many fundamentalist groups are against it. Some zealots calling themselves “Jesus Freaks” even picketed the show opening night in New York…”

So, explanation number one – the show succeeds because it panders to the Jesus movement, is probably not true.

So on to explanation number two; is it an affront to Christianity, an even more cynical attempt to capitalize on the “no such thing as bad publicity” formula for entertainment?  Does the show do something sacrilegious to generate controversy to get free publicity to promote the show?  Huffman again: “Although the management expected the most trouble from the Bible Belt Midwest and South, traveling companies played to their biggest groups-the “Mary Poppins family audiences”-in just these areas. And got standing ovations.”  

So, JCS doesn’t succeed because it panders to Christians, and it doesn’t succeed because it provokes Christians, either.  As for our third key factor, the weirdness of the staging, that just seems to have been a bad idea that needed to be discarded for the show to gain its second life in the UK.  If we want to know why JCS succeeds, we need to figure out what it is that was good enough to survive the very non-Biblical giant set of false teeth.

Huffman has this answer: “Works like Jesus Christ Superstar, which “ask the right questions” but allow each individual to provide his own answers, will be appropriated by nearly all-the atheist, the agnostic, and the believer. Only the indifferent will remain unimpressed; only the devout and the aesthetically critical may be offended. Since Superstar is basically neutral, it can profit from nearly everyone’s inertia.” 

[reluctantly] Hmmmm…maybe, but doesn’t that beg the question of what started the inertia in the first place?  And there’s something to be said for producing something that appeals to a lot of people, but history doesn’t generally regard the neutral as having a lasting and powerful influence on culture.  Is what Uncle Tom’s Cabin so memorable that it was neutral on the institution of slavery?  Was A Christmas Carol a great story that raised questions about poverty and economic inequality but let everyone come to their own answers?  Does Shakespeare end Hamlet with – “yeah, be or be not, whatever.  They’re both fine choices.”  I generally think that things that just ask questions without answers are…unsatisfying.  Or at least, it might be possible to raise questions without answering them in a particularly appealing way, but the formula of “don’t take a stand and that will boost your commercial success” is a place where Huffman and I part company.

I given Huffman a little bit of a short shrift here – he’s got a more elaborate defense of ambiguity than I am presenting in this caricature, but most of all I think it misses the main point.

The thing that made the show work is the music.  Huffman kinda talks about the music, our friend Jessica Sternfeld, as always, has a very detailed analysis of it.  Everyone always points out the ALW music draws on a bunch of different influences from the soaring classical to the tin penny pastiche, but whatever he’s doing, it works.  People like Memory from Cats – in fact, popular singers like it so much they re- and re-record it constantly – and they like JCS.  The question that had never been answered before the show was whether you could use a double-album LP as the basis to launch a Broadway musical, and the answer is not only “yes,” in the most resounding terms, but that the formula of great-album-to-Broadway launched a whole new era called the “megamusical.”  

Jessica Sternfeld is a scholar of musical theater of the highest order, and her history goes roughly like this: There is a Broadway golden age that runs from Oklahoma in 1943 to Fiddler in 1965, then it’s the Sondheim era, then there’s a bit of malaise before ALW explodes on the scene and launches the age of the megamusical.  It starts with JCS, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that there is no musical without the album.

At the very least, I think you can say that the album was absolutely critical to the success of the stage show.  The fact that so many different amateur, church, and community groups were staging some performance based solely on the album means that the music was really, really good and good enough that people were willing to go and see it performed before there was staging of any sort, and even without knowing how ambiguous the final plot was going to be.  

If you liked the album – which a lot of people did, since it was the best-selling double album of all time – you wanted to see the show.  If your explanation for the success of JCS doesn’t focus squarely on the music, you are kind of missing something.  As Huffman points out, many critics did.  And I think Huffman’s analysis kind of shows that while the critics were having a collective fit about the staging and hurling accusations about how the show fit into pop culture or what it was doing to high culture or whether it was fooling all of the people at least some of the time, all those folks in the Midwest – and at Gettysburgh College – were just listening to the album and having a great time doing it.

If there’s a lesson for theater that we can all take from JCS, it is that if you’re gonna do a musical, you gotta have great music.  In fact, the lesson might go so far as to be that if you’re music is good enough, you can have a really successful show even if the staging is a postmodern catastrophe gone wrong and the plot is a bit a of yawn.  

There’s also something to be said for seeing the music performed live.  I have made allusions to the 1973 movie.  Marc Goodacre, our scholar from Duke, spends time analyzing it and makes good points about Jesus being 3-dimensional, capable of change, the relationship with Mary being very human and profound whether sexual or not, and points out that the director uses some clever camera angles to emphasize points in ways that film can do and other media cannot.  In the end, Goodacre finds the film 15 years ahead of its time, but ends by noting that it was not very well received and the most it can claim is a cult following.  To me, it just shows that the plot of this show is not, with apologies to James Huffman, enough to draw in audiences fascinated by the ambiguous presentation of questions that allow them to take away their own answers.

For me, the contrast of the movie with the album is a fascinating.  I have probably listened to The Wall by Pink Floyd hundreds of times.  Heck, as a younger person I have even gone to the Griffith Observatory to watch the Pink Floyd laser show more times than my undergraduate budget should have allowed.  But I’ve seen the movie exactly once, and didn’t really want to see it again.  Weird, isn’t it, that you’d prefer to listen to music version without any video than watch video with music that you like?  I mean, it’s the same music, right?  But there’s something about how the music gets presented that makes a difference.

And listening to the album is something that rings true, and watching it live brings the music more alive, as all live performances of music do.  But watching the video just isn’t.  The lesson for theater, that the JCS production brings home for me, is that you can perform great music and it can carry your show, and the same thing is not true for film.

The lesson for life is that, although it is now common to say that we live in a contentious world, there is actually far more agreement than you’d think.  There is massive and widespread support for creating legal pathways to citizenship for immigrants.  And truly, our immigration system is a mess, especially the laws for asylum, and we are obviously in a situation where our economy more or less depends on the labor of people we refuse to grant citizenship to.  The whole legal apparatus is a mess.  And, amongst the hard-core right, there is still mass opposition to any form of immigration and a push to deport everyone possible.  But that is VERY MUCH a minority viewpoint.  The same is true of abortion, and nuclear weapons, and social security, and just about every issue.  There will always be a very hard core and very vocal 20-25% of the US population that will care a lot about a no-compromise position, and for the overwhelming group of the rest of us there is widespread agreement for a middle way.

The trick is to make it so that the loudest, most extreme, and most fundamental voices don’t set the agenda for everyone.  Which they usually do, so when I say “trick” that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s easy.

And that is exactly what happened with JCS.  Given the subject matter, and the decidedly middle of the road interpretation the show was going with on the question of who Jesus was, everyone expected a mass backlash.  The BBC censors did, the critics just took it as read that those in the emerging Jesus movement were either going to love or hate it, everyone braced for a huge fight, and in the end it just had its run on Broadway, was propelled forward by its masterful music and held back by it’s bizarre staging, both artistic elements, and but for a few minor protests and some angry articles the show, as they say, simply went on, and played just as well in the most conservative parts of the Bible belt as it did in the most freewheeling parts of California.  And I, at least, find some comfort in that.  What makes art work or fail is its own merits, and not the rigid political viewpoints of the most extreme voices.  The lesson for life is that we have to jealously guard that.  If you want a historical example of what happens when the radicals take the helm just tune in to any podcast about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the rise of Hitler.  It doesn’t end with good Broadway shows.

That will do it for now.  The show works because of the music, the religious themes and kerfuffle work out pretty much how Rice and Webber thought they should and despite themselves.  They said they were trying to be artistic and not theological, BUT you can’t re-tell the Jesus story and make him far less divine WITHOUT making a theological statement, and you can’t re-make Judas without having a profound statement on Judaism, yet despite all this the audiences mostly reacted to the artistic elements of the show and the religious angle, while not absent, was not dominant.  The lesson we can take for life is that you can predict what the loudest voices will say – but that doesn’t make them right, or even advancing anything like a consensus – and in an encouraging way good art can overcome bad politics.

This is where I introduce our next episode.  This time, I’m going to do it with a quote from Dougals Adams’ master work, the HHGTG: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.  There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

What JCS definitely did – what all the critics noticed and generally liked – what you can’t really miss about the show – is that it re-tells the crucifixion story from the perspective of Judas.  That is revolutionary, since for at least 16 centuries Judas has been vilified over and over so often that even the name is synonymous with betrayal, and few can quibble with Peter Stanford’s assessment that Judas is now the most hated name in history.  So re-telling the Jesus story from the perspective of Judas, which has gotta make the figure of Judas more sympathetic and the figure of Jesus more complicated, is a big deal.  Its what created the religious controversy over the show, and it’s what Tim Rice in particular thought was the artistic choice that made the narrative interesting.

No matter how you slice it, telling the story from the perspective of Judas is the defining hook of the show.  And what if, as Douglas Adams might not be surprised to hear, that had already happened?  Long, long ago, at the very origins of Christianity…In a lost gospel that was written, sealed away, and uncovered more than an thousand years later and only after the musical had had its day?  Something that amazing couldn’t really happen, could it?  We will get our collective Indiana Jones on in the next episode of THM, and beware of the snakes!

New Citations

Immigration polls

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/us-immigration-support-crackdown-trump-minnesota/

Neely quotes

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/ted-neeley-jesus-christ-superstar-50th-anniversary-1.7007717