Main Street Arts Jesus Christ Superstar Pictures King Herod
'Jesus Christ Superstar' at 50: What Was the Fizz?
The rock opera, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, opened on Broadway on Oct. 12, 1971, to protests, an irate composer — and sold-out shows.
Jeff Fenholt every bit Jesus of Nazareth in the Broadway product of "Jesus Christ Superstar" in 1971. Credit... Friedman-Abeles, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
It was the spring of 1970, and Yvonne Elliman, an xviii-twelvemonth-old vocaliser and guitarist from Hawaii, had but finished performing at a London nightclub when a breathless young human rushed the stage.
"You're my Mary Magdalene!" a wide-eyed, 22-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber announced.
"I idea he meant the mother of God," Elliman, now 69, said in a recent telephone conversation, explaining that she had been unfamiliar with the biblical story. "He was like, 'No, no, no, no, information technology's not the mother, it's the whore.'"
They had a laugh, and she went on to sing the part in "Jesus Christ Superstar," the seminal stone opera by Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, for the concept album, the kickoff arena tour, the original Broadway product and the characteristic film.
The musical, which opened 50 years ago on October. 12, 1971, turned the story of one of history's most notorious executions into a splashy spectacle. In doing so, information technology married stone and musical theater, ushering in Broadway's British invasion of the 1970s and 1980s and paving the mode for shows similar "Les Misérables" and "The Phantom of the Opera."
But the nigh 90-infinitesimal concept anthology came first in 1970, because, equally Lloyd Webber recalled recently to The Telegraph, no producer wanted to put "the worst thought in history" onstage.
"We never knew how it was e'er going to get staged," Lloyd Webber, 73, said in a recent phone conversation. "So it wasn't a collection of rock tracks or something put together. Information technology had to be read to y'all and you could sympathise — the dramatic context of the whole thing had to be the recording."
Paradigm
Though the album fizzled in England, the rock opera with a full orchestra and gospel choir took off in America, climbing to No. 1 on the Billboard charts past Feb 1971. A year after its release, the initial album had sold 2.5 million copies in the Usa.
"We were staggered by the success," Rice, 76, the show'south lyricist, said in a video call from his home in Buckinghamshire, England. "MCA allow us make a single — 2 unknown guys — with a huge orchestra and a rock department. And with rather a controversial championship. And it worked."
A national concert bout followed in 1971, and audiences packed stadiums to hear Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Carl Anderson (Judas) and Jeff Fenholt (Jesus) chugalug out hits like "I Don't Know How to Honey Him," "Sky on Their Minds" and "Gethsemane (I Simply Want to Say)."
"Information technology was crazy," Elliman said. "I was asked to go to a hospital and put my hands on a girl who'd been in a car accident. I didn't know what to say — I held her mitt and sat with her. But a few weeks after, her parents wrote to me that she got better immediately after me seeing her."
Broadway Opening
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At last, they got the green light: Broadway.
Tom O'Horgan ("Hair") was tapped to direct after Lloyd Webber missed a telegram from the managing director Hal Prince, who had expressed interest. "The one person I'd have loved to have seen do it would have been Hal Prince," Lloyd Webber said in the interview. "Would it have turned out differently? Would it have been good? I don't know."
The show, which narrates the final 7 days of Jesus's life through the eyes of one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, opened at the Marking Hellinger Theater on 51st Street to an audience that included Lloyd Webber, 23, and Rice, 26. Merely in a joint interview with The New York Times later that calendar month, both men practically disowned their managing director.
"Let'south just say that we don't think this product is the definitive one," said Lloyd Webber, who in later years would phone call O'Horgan'southward $700,000 staging a "brash and vulgar interpretation" and opening nighttime "probably the worst dark of my life."
Reviews were mixed. Dick Brukenfield of The Hamlet Voice praised Lloyd Webber's "energetic music" but noted that the ocular dazzle — the sets included a large special-effects "chrysalis," a bridge of bones, and a giant set of dentures — distracted from the story. "It looks like a record that'south been reproduced onstage with visual filler by Tom O'Horgan," he wrote.
The New York Times critic Clive Barnes panned the production, writing that it "rather resembled one's first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting, just somewhat unsurprising and of minimal creative value."
Cries of "Irreverence!"
Opening night attracted crowds of leaflet-bearing Christian and Jewish protesters, who regarded what The New York Times writer Guy Flatley chosen "the strutting, mincing, twitching, grinding, souped‐upwardly 'Superstar'" as theatrical sacrilege.
"Going into the theater it'd exist 'Irreverence! Irreverence!'" said Ben Vereen, now 75, who played Judas.
Lloyd Webber added: "I'chiliad non convinced that Robert Stigwood, our producer, might not have actually orchestrated one or two of them. I think it might have had a much rougher ride today than it did so."
Rice and Lloyd Webber were accused of denying the divinity of Christ and making a hero of Judas, who is the unambiguous villain in the New Testament. Jewish leaders were alarmed that the musical made it announced as if Jews were responsible for Jesus'south crucifixion, which they feared would fan antisemitism.
"Nosotros were criticized for leaving out the Resurrection," Rice said. "Simply that was not part of our story because, past then, Judas was dead. And his story was over."
Conservative Christians were also startled past the sexual overtones between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who finds herself falling in dear with him.
"I'd get evil letters from people who said they wanted to kill Mary and then Yvonne could come out again," Elliman said.
But Rice is clear: There was never an affair in the "Superstar" story line.
"I would imagine he would have been a very attractive human being and withal not somebody who was out looking for a girlfriend," he said. "He was somebody who was charismatic and powerful. And, and this woman is slightly afraid of that, maybe afraid of what her ain feelings are."
Jesus and Judas
Prototype
Jesus Christ, played by Jeff Fenholt, loses his temper, doubts God and gets a bit defenseless up in his own glory. He's just Jesus, the human, with all the attendant issues and failings.
"He could feel pain," Rice said. "If he was only a god, then things like a crucifixion, which is a horrible, horrible torture and death, wouldn't really be a problem. If he's a man, whether or not he's a god, he has to suffer. He has to have doubts."
Those doubts are well-nigh on display in the "Gethsemane" stone scream, in which Jesus pleads — with a wailing G in a higher place loftier C — for God to let this cup pass from him.
"We wanted to have a rock tenor who contrasted with the voice of Judas," Lloyd Webber said.
Vereen, who was cast every bit Judas, was nominated for a Tony Award for the role. He said the biblical business relationship of the human relationship between Jesus and Judas left him room for interpretation.
"Jesus never wrote the book, and Judas never wrote the book," he said. "All we hear is the hearsay of these men from the disciples in the Gospels."
Inspired past the Bob Dylan lyric "Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?" from the 1964 song "With God on Our Side," Rice set out to humanize the New Attestation'south unambiguous villain.
"I idea, well, 'This is a very skilful graphic symbol, which I can expand from what's in the Bible, considering there isn't very much in the Bible,'" Rice said. "He was a man being. He had skillful points and bad points. He had strengths and weaknesses."
At first, Vereen said, he struggled to understand his character'southward motivation. Then, later combing through the Bible, he came up with a theory.
"Hypothetically speaking, maybe Judas actually loved Jesus more than any of the other disciples and wanted him to be the hero that ruled the country," Vereen said. "And he felt that if he betrayed him, the Israelites would insubordinate and put Jesus in the office."
A Musical Radio Play
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Because the show began equally what Lloyd Webber calls a musical radio play, meant to be listened to straight through for 90 minutes without whatsoever visuals "on a turntable, in those days," he said, he had to come up with strategies to keep the listener'south attention.
"A lot of that has to do with how you plant themes and how you lot bargain with them," he said. "My idea for the overture was to introduce every ingredient that I could think of within the musical palette nosotros were going to hear through the residuum of the recording."
And and then those themes recur, one by i, equally when the whole of the overture is mirrored in the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, or when a song reappears with a twist, like "I Don't Know How to Dearest Him." To Mary Magdalene information technology's a dearest song well-nigh Jesus; when it returns equally a motif sung by Judas as a complaining, the lyrics alter: "He's non a rex, he'south merely the same/As anyone I know/He scares me so."
"Judas understood Jesus, and he obviously was clearly obsessed and loved him," Lloyd Webber said. "And and then at the same fourth dimension, you've got this woman, who was as well, if you lot follow the Bible, clearly very, very much in love with him."
And then, of form, at that place's the musical's oddball track.
Herod, Paul Ainsley's glitter-flecked, platform-sandaled drag queen, commands the son of God to "Prove to me that you're no fool/walk beyond my pond puddle" in "King Herod's Song (Endeavor It and See)." The boisterous ragtime number serves as comic relief afterwards Jesus'southward gut-wrenching "Gethsemane" aria.
"Information technology'southward taking a conventional showbiz number and making it something actually very, very nasty," Lloyd Webber said. "When Herod turns effectually and says, 'Go out of my life!,' that'southward a number that's gone wrong."
Rice said: "Musically, I think it's a brilliant stroke on Andrew's part. Just as everything's getting heavier and heavier and heavier, and suddenly you have a very tricky melody. We wanted people to virtually be misled into thinking, 'Oh, well, y'all know, possibly information technology's going to be a happy catastrophe.'"
The Show'southward Legacy
With $1.2 million in advance sales, the Broadway show sold out almost every operation for the first six weeks. Merely the hype speedily dimmed. It ran for 711 performances in all and failed to win a Tony Award despite v nominations, including one for best score.
But the musical's legacy has endured, spawning three Broadway revivals (in 1977, 2000 and 2012), a 2012 Lloyd Webber-produced televised contest series to bandage the titular function for a British arena tour, a 2018 televised NBC production that starred John Legend equally Jesus and resulted in Emmy wins for Rice and Lloyd Webber — and now the 50th anniversary American tour, interrupted by the pandemic, that resumed performances in Seattle late last calendar month.
"51 years since the album came out … blimey!" Rice said.
Lloyd Webber, looking dorsum, said, "Everything I was doing was all instinct." He added, "Yes, I'd had some amateur productions, only we'd never had anything in the professional theater — and I don't know whether that would accept influenced us for good or bad."
He thought for a second.
"Without sounding immodest" — he chuckled — "it'south actually rather skilful."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/theater/jesus-christ-superstar-50th-anniversary.html
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