by Michael Coveney.
After their initial success with an early, twenty-minute version of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1968, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice were taken up by producer David Land, given a weekly wage of £20 a week each, an office, and encouraged to write anything at all with just one request: Land urged them to steer clear of the Bible; he’d had enough religion already.
So of course they wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, which caused the sort of outrage and controversy more associated at that time with the Royal Court Theatre. But the Lord Chamberlain was now gone, Hair, the tribal rock protest musical had announced the Age of Aquarius, and The Who had composed a rock musical, Tommy, that contained distinct theatrical possibilities. Superstar was first conceived as a stage show but entered the world as a double record album.
That recording featured some of the best rock musicians of the day. Murray Head was Judas, Ian Gillan of Deep Purple was an affecting Jesus, his voice a pickled, rasping gurgle, and Mike d’Abo of Manfred Mann sang King Herod’s camp “challenge” number (“Prove to me that you’re no fool, walk across my swimming pool”). The gloriously gifted Madeline Bell sang in support and the role of Mary Magdalene was taken by 19 year-old Hawaian beauty Yvonne Elliman whom Lloyd Webber had found singing “Blowing in the Wind” for £5 a night plus drinks in a club along the King’s Road. Barry Dennen, who had appeared in Hair, sang Pilate with an incisive and histrionic grace that became his trademark.
The album was original and exhilarating. The music had tremendous energy which, blending with Rice’s cynical, quizzical lyrics, never stood still for a minute. Quite apart from the songs themselves, the score was full of fragmentary moments that belied an unusual talent, such as the melodic phrase, made almost in passing, on Judas’s “It seems to me a strange thing, mystifying…” and Jesus’s angry riposte in Mary Magdalene’s defence. Lloyd Webber’s taste for unusual time signatures made a stunning debut in Mary’s “Everything’s Alright,” a number that bowls along, five syncopated beats in a bar, like an undulating hillside or gentle wave. There was the majestic entrance to Jerusalem — “Hosanna Heysanna Sanna Sanna Ho, Sanna Hey Sanna Ho Sanna, Hey JC, JC won’t you fight for me? Sanna Ho Sanna Hey Superstar” — the concerted soul shout of “Christ you know I love you” and the howling anguish of the vulnerable hero in the Garden of Gethsemane. And as Jesus died on the cross, the orchestra gathered in one of the most sweeping and melancholy of all melodies.
And of course there was “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” with its Mendelssohn quotation. One critic made comparisons with the fierce, Eastern European modernist composers Ligeti and Penderecki. Another invoked Greig and Prokofiev. When Dmitri Shostakovich, arguably the greatest composer of the twentieth century, and certainly one of its greatest artistic spirits, came to London shortly before he died in 1975 to attend the British premiere of his Fifteenth Symphony, he asked to go and see a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palace Theatre. He was so impressed that he went back the following night to see it again.
It was the subject matter as much as the music that caused the stir that followed the album’s release. In 1966, John Lennon declared that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and there was even a short time when it seemed possible he might make the most of both reputations by taking the lead in the stage version of Superstar. A more secular approach to religion — diehards would call it blasphemy — was part of the mood of the time. And even that mood was not all that new. The medieval Mystery plays had shown the human side of the Passion. The more ambivalent, sexual connotations of Superstar — expressed in Judas’s symbiotic fascination with the people’s pin-up and Mary Magdalene’s confused devotion as expressed in her best song — were also part of the cultural currency. Nikos Kazantzakis’s sensational 1955 novel, The Last Temptation of Christ (filmed many years later by Martin Scorsese with Willam Dafoe and Harvey Keitel as Jesus and Judas), was at least as interestingly outspoken. And Pasolini’s breath-taking 1964 black and white film The Gospel According to St Matthew gave a modern credence to the story of a closed community battling against, and baffled by, mystical imperatives.
The double album played for ninety minutes divided into three minute slabs and, for an effective concert or theatrical performance, no libretto was needed. There was no impulse behind the composition of a “through-sung” musical beyond making it make sense as a record. Unlicensed concert performances started springing up all over America, and in February 1971 — as the album hit the top spot in the US charts — Rice and Lloyd Webber, with David Land, went to New York to discuss strategies. The producer Robert Stigwood, with whom Land now worked, was tracking down these unlicensed performances and wiping them out with legal action. The rewards, as he now owned the grand rights, would justify the costs. He started by putting out his own concert version, like a rock and roll tour.
Yvonne Elliman sang Mary Magdalene, the young folk rock singer Jeff Fenholt (later to appear in the Broadway premiere) appeared as Jesus, Carl Anderson (later in the film) was a black Judas, and a twenty-strong choir beefed it up with a 32-piece band. This proved an unmitigated triumph. The first authorised live concert performance was given to an audience of 12,000 people in Pittsburgh in July 1971. After a four week tour visiting nineteen cities, it was raining money, and by September a second tour was on its way. There followed a college tour. And then Stigwood licensed performances all over the world.
Finally, on 12 October 1971, Rice and Lloyd Webber made their Broadway debuts when Superstar was produced at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on 51st Street. The initial director, Frank Corsaro, was replaced by Tom O’Horgan, who had directed Hair and had been brought in with the brief of “theatricalising” an oratorio. Everyone learned the hard way, and too late, that this was an unnecessary approach: huge angels swung about on psychedelic wings across shimmering, surreal sets by Robin Wagner and a full battery of laser beams, smoke and wind machines. There were dancing dwarfs and lepers and a crucifixion scene set on a dazzling golden triangle. Still, it was instantly a landmark in musical theatre history. The evangelist Billy Graham inveighed against it, the theatre was picketed by the National Secular Society with leaflets dubbing the show “Jesus Christ Supersham” and one irate nun carried a banner declaring “I am a Bride of Christ, not Mrs Superstar!”
Lloyd Webber’s first reaction to the Broadway production was to return to basics, strip away the veneer and insist on an austere London production more suited to the rawness and simplicity of the work itself. To this end, the Australian director Jim Sharman was recruited to do the opposite of Tom O’Horgan’s extravaganza. Sharman had already directed the acclaimed Australian premiere in Sydney and his similarly simple, uncluttered production which opened at the Palace Theatre on 9 August 1972 was an instant hit. The top price seat cost £2.50 and the advance bookings a quarter of a million pounds. It cost £120,000 to put on, went into profit after 22 weeks and became the longest-running musical in West End history, overtaking Lionel Bart’s Oliver! with its 2,620th performance on 3 October 1978 and closing in 1980 after playing for 3,358 performances and taking £7m at the box office.
The London cast included another sand-blasted voice in Stephen Tate’s Judas, a sympathetic and good-looking Jesus in Paul Nicholas, the huge and lustrous Dana Gillespie as Mary Magdalene and Paul Jabara as Herod. Sharman’s production was stark, gripping, dignified and very moving. The chorus of unknowns included Floella Benjamin, Diane Langton, Elaine Paige and Richard O’Brien, later renowned for writing The Rocky Horror Show.
The script for Norman Jewison’s 1973 movie was by Melvyn Bragg, the cinematography by the estimable Douglas Slocombe, and the score conducted by Andre Previn. The critical reception was muted, but the film stands up as both theatrically intelligent and cinematically interesting. We are watching a fit-up show by a travelling troupe of hippies in the desert. Once you accept — as a ritual, as an impromptu day trip? — that the busload of rocky thesps comes out of nowhere, erects a whole lot of scaffolding around some ancient ruins, does the business, then goes home without any sign of an audience, you can actually enjoy the movie.
The show has outlived its own notoriety and survives in a score of vibrancy and great power, as witnessed in many revivals. A 1973 Tokyo version which visited London in 1991 portrayed Judas as a desperate outlaw, Caiphas and the priests as magnificently attired, and magnificently sung, kabuki soldiers and the Jesus of Yuichiro Yamaguchi as a stern warrior of still and ferocious theatrical presence. Herod’s swimming pool song was brilliantly mis-conveyed by a shrieking transvestite tossing his fan and slipping off his sandals as a high-class kimono-reversing courtesan.
Going against the tide was the theme, too, of the 1996 London revival’s poster, Christ in a white dhoti charging across Waterloo Bridge in the rush hour stampede of office workers. Gale Edwards’s fine production at the newly restored Lyceum was both grittier and more sensual than Sharman’s original. There was a UK tour of the show in 2004 and then, ten years later, an arena tour which fetched up at the vast O2 Arena in Greenwich and featured Ben Forster, who had won Lloyd Webber’s own talent-spotting television show, as Jesus, Matilda composer Tim Minchin as Judas, ex-Spice Girl Melanie C as Mary Magdalene and radio disc jockey Chris Moyles as Herod. It was fascinating to see the musical with so many great outdoor scenes – the entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the betrayal in Gethsemane and the climax on Calvary – in the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, five years ago–the first British al fresco production under a darkening sky. The same revival was just as powerful when it moved into the Barbican without the weather.
Tickets for Jesus Christ Superstar (Monday 25– Saturday 30 March 2024) are on sale at mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.
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