Jesus Christ Superstar
So, Saturday night I was supposed to go see Jesus Christ Superstar with fr_defenestrato. Alas, he came down with the plague and could not attend. So I called every person I knew in the city and begged them to go with me. The one person who was available was my friend Roy, so I met up with him in Columbia Heights and we headed down to the show.
Now, neither of us had ever seen JCS, and I only knew the refrain from the finale where everyone says "Jesus Christ! SUPERSTAR!" and that was like the extent of it. I read a little about it on Wikipedia and knew that it was the Passion and was kind of like, okay, sure whatever. It's lent!
We were at the Warner Theatre and they've got all these posters up saying that this production features Ted Neeley, who played Jesus in the JCS movie. The first thing out of my friend's mouth during the intermission was "Isn't Jesus supposed to be like 33?" I said, "Yeah, and he looks like a hard 50!" Well, it turns out that the film adaptation that Ted Neeley was in was in 1973! Yeah. Jesus was 65 years old, and he looked it. Damn. Looking at the original film posters, he made a damn fine Jesus back then. But sometimes you've got to give up the ghost Ted.
Our seats were up at the front of the balcony, in the area with the drink service lady. We took full advantage of it and ordered champagne and cocktails. We were laughing about how it seems so upscale and trashy at the same time. There was a woman in a mink fur coat eating barbecue potato chips next to a lady in sweat pants. It was kind of ghetto fabulous.
The first act made me mostly laugh. I was like, what the hell, this goes from sounding like Jethro Tull to Blood, Sweat and Tears and it was pretty disjointed. Not to mention that Jesus was really not doing that great of a singing job in there. He was really breathless, and he had a lot of unsung, just kind of emphatically spoken bits where it sounded like it was supposed be sung... It was kind of bad. As I mentioned in the twitter, I liked Judas, Mary Magdalene and Simon the Zealot. Well, I was hot for Simon the Zealot. But he could really belt out a song. Jesus and Caiaphas were not so hot in act one. Caiaphas was the worst, because his voice went from being Stephen Merritt low bass to being kind of Muppet-like and whiny. There was a noticeably bad octave break in him that made me cringe.
Act Two was in some respects better, but it felt WAY more disjointed. What I liked better was that Jesus's vocals got a lot more rockin, like 80's hair-band rockin, Whitesnake and Tawny Kitaen rockin. He wailed the shit out of that song. I don't even know what it was, but he had this hella long "WAAAAAAA!" thing that was just awesome. That actually made up for a lot of the criticism that I had for his performance. Anyone who could hit that sustained wail is probably just fine for the role. Though, like I said, the second act felt a lot more slapdash than the first. It was more of a revue with songs that were inspired by the Passion than an actual plot driven story. The thing that bothered me the most was the finale. I mean, we go from crucifixion straight into that famous "Jesus Christ! SUPERSTAR!" thing, and it was so not enough for me. I mean, I wanted to see some kind of entombing, and stone rolled away, and all that business, but it goes from being on the cross right into bodily ascension and it just left me wanting more story. I mean, if they were all standing outside the tomb doing the JCS theme song that would be a little more comprehensible. As it was it was just kind of a "huh?" moment.
Overall, the music, when performed well, wasn't that bad, the story needed a bit more polishing, and the work as a whole needed to be more cohesive. But it's Andrew Lloyd Weber, and it's been around for nearly 40 years. It would take a miracle for there to be any adjustment to this show.
Dear Jesus. Please make Jesus Christ Superstar a better Musical. Amen.