Hi, everyone! In the same vein as my last post, which started as another installment of the evergreen “Ask Me Anything” series and wound up focusing on a specific topic instead, I was hit with two questions in a row that were too big on their own to mix into another AMA post. (Honestly, I feel like this has been coming for a while, as my answers to certain questions have gotten progressively longer over the life of the column.) So, until something better to write about comes along, I’m going to stick with this for a while.
These questions, funnily enough, given where the discussion that led to my last post originated, concern one of my favorite musicals of all time, Jesus Christ Superstar. As I indicated in my directing proposal for the show, I’ve been brainstorming how to stage this thing pretty much since the first grade, and everybody who knows me knows that. One of them found the ask box on my Tumblr, because this is what tumbled in (shut up, you loved that pun, you liar):
Has any production of JCS come close to your vision of the show?
Anonymous
Well, I’ve had so many visions of the show that it was kind of hard to gauge how to answer this question.
My current default notion is that JCS works better as a concert than staged, one major reason being that any full staging is instantly subject to (over-)analysis because nobody has ever locked down one “acceptable” way of doing it, no “Brown Album” equivalent in terms of staging and design standards. And I think we already know why. Some don’t consider this a flaw, but it objectively is: JCS doesn’t have a spoken book, which has frequently proven problematic to directors in its long history of theatrical staging. As the show was recorded in the studio before it was performed, it was originally written for the ears, not the eyes, and consequently, some of the score is difficult to stage adequately, especially for audiences used to the more skillful storytelling of modern pop operas like Les Mis, Rent (albeit to a limited extent, suffering as it did from literal “death of the author”), and others. The structure of JCS can feel disjointed, almost like a collection of music videos, rather than one coherent narrative.
Fans say that’s because the directors who’ve done JCS are unfamiliar with opera or unable to trust that the audience will be able to accept it as opera, but a cursory glance at Tom O’Horgan’s, Jim Sharman’s, or Gale Edwards’ résumés (to name three) shows opera experience is not the barrier. We even have O’Horgan’s word on this, from Elizabeth L. Wollman’s book The Theater Will Rock: “…it just was not very theatrically constructed. When I first attacked the piece with Andrew, he said he would write some other numbers that would help make it flow a little better. But he didn’t. So we just had to create visual things that would work with the music and make it understandable.” (Whether O’Horgan succeeded in making it understandable with his “visual things” is another story entirely, depending on who you talk to, but still, “getting” opera was not the issue.)
Because of this lack of a book, and a score that’s largely inner monologue rather than exposition or explication, directors and choreographers try to give it structure through blocking and dance and the creation of “scenes” to set up what comes next. But that can get in the way, to the point of becoming a big stumbling block in some productions. It could be argued that this inability to settle on the best way to stage JCS is part of the show’s beauty, what makes it so special, but it leads to too much second-guessing; in my opinion, it’s better to strive for something more concrete.
To me, that means one should zero in on what makes it so wonderful, so historic, and so beloved by us. The music, the lyrics, the text-setting, and the lyrical phrasings… all remain brilliant after 50 years. Forget, for example, the eternal tug of war between a modern and a biblical look — concentrate on the music. A staged concert does not overly concern itself with sets, costumes, props, or a thematic concept that requires a dozen steps of thinking and rethinking; in a concert version of a musical, there’s an understanding that you’re not getting the full kit. The audience sits up and pays attention because there’s little (in JCS‘ case, no) dialogue, and rather than reading as a series of unrelated songs (as it can in a conventional staging), the full score carries the plot’s weight. It shouldn’t throw anyone nearly as much in concert as it can when one tries to make it a “standard theater evening.”
If we limit our focus to that concept, I’ve seen it tackled successfully several times.
- In-person, I’ve seen JCS performed in concert by groups such as A2Z Theatrical (twice, the cast of which included JCS vet Danny Zolli on both occasions and Carl Anderson — as Pilate! — once), David Tessier’s All-Star Stars (twice), and the Ultrasonic Rock Orchestra (once), all in the New England area.
- Through recorded mediums, I’ve seen many great examples from all over the map, including: Anthony Von Eckstein’s long-running JCS which played around the Bay Area of California from 1988-1992 (clips can be found here); The Noise magazine (and, later, Boston Rock Opera) presenting a JCS that was raw and more concert than theater in its early days, though frequently costumed and occasionally equipped with sets and props (clips can be found here); the justly famous 1992 Australian revival cast (now on YouTube); JCS: A Resurrection, as performed by The Indigo Girls and friends at SXSW ’95 (briefly available for sale on video and now on YouTube); Astarte Syriaca’s prog metal revamp of the score (clips can be found here); frequent performances by the Tábor Superstar Band (clips can be found here); the many renditions presented by the Horningsea Reduced Theatre Company, sometimes with a cast as small as three people (clips can be found here); and The Petty Thefts and friends, who closed their club performance of JCS with a cover of “The Last Waltz” rather than the downer of an agonizing crucifixion and a string instrumental (clips can be found here).
Each production had things I loved, things I merely liked, and things that I’d do differently, but they reflected that particular vision pretty well. Namely, for the most part, they weren’t about robes and sandals. They embraced the era of thunderous, fist-in-the-air, classic ’60s and ’70s Brit rock (The Beatles, The Who, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Queen, etc.) that JCS came from. This was a rock opera that changed the world, and it looked — and sounded — like it, complete with epic lighting, in-your-face sound, band and singers onstage throughout the performance… in short, a full-on contemporary rock and roll spectacle. By no means did any of these performers skimp on the story, but they didn’t sacrifice the edge to tell it either.
However, that answer wasn’t enough for this person, who wanted to pin me down. They shot back with this:
What’s been your favorite staged version of JCS? (Non-concert)
Anonymous
Okay, I’ll bite, but remember: you asked for this essay, pal.
First, a list of the staged (non-concert) versions of JCS I’ve seen: two high school productions (about which you’ll hear nothing in this post; it’s unfair to judge them in competition with pros), the closing performance of the 2000 Broadway revival, two performances of the national tour that followed said revival (one of which featured Carl Anderson as Judas and Barry Dennen — Pilate on the original album, Broadway, and in the 1973 film — as Herod), and four performances of a national tour initially billed as Ted Neeley’s “farewell” engagement in the role of Jesus. In total, discounting the number of performances of each, five productions, only three of which we’ll consider here.
The 2000 Broadway revival had all the same problems as the video which reflected that production: I’m sure Gale Edwards is a fine director, but she missed the boat with this particular iteration of JCS. (Not having seen her original 1996 production at the Lyceum Theatre, which unfortunately never left that venue and was reportedly far better than what went wide, I can only comment on this version.) Her direction — and the production design that accompanied it — were full of the kinds of blatant, offensively obvious attempts at symbolism and subtlety that appeal only to pseudo-intellectual theater kids. In real life, there’s no such thing as obvious good vs. obvious evil (things just ain’t black and white, people), and any attempt to portray this concept on stage or in a film usually results in a hokey “comic book” product, which is kind of what the 2000 production was.
The first thing Edwards did was draw her line in the sand. “These are the good guys, and these are the bad guys.” The overall production design played into this ‘line in the sand’ feel as well, being so plain in its intentions as to almost beat you over the head with them. There may have been some good concepts mixed in, but for a show that runs on moral ambiguity, they were very poorly executed and did damage to the piece. Some examples:
- Annas and Caiaphas were devoutly “evil,” seemingly designed to inspire fear. It’s easy to see good as so very good, and bad as so very bad; to want to have the evil in a nice little box. But it’s not that simple. As Captain Jean-Luc Picard (and now you know where my Star Trek loyalties lie, curse you!) once said, “…villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those that clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.” Evil isn’t always a clear and recognizable stereotype. It could be lurking inside anyone, even you, and you’d never know. People aren’t inherently evil. Like good, it’s a role they grow and live into. And since history is a story of the developments and actions of humans over the ages, maybe it’s a mistake to view the characters who’ve played their parts in it so one-dimensionally. It doesn’t dismiss the evil they did, but it does allow one to understand that this potential to be good or to be evil is in everyone and that it’s not always as simple as just doing the right thing.
- Judas was an almost thoroughly unlikable prick (though Tony Vincent played him a bit more sympathetically than Jérôme Pradon in the video); any sense of a fully three-dimensional person was lost, leaving us with a total dickhead constantly beating Jesus over the head with his cynicism and curt remarks. If the audience is to truly feel for Judas and appreciate his fall, they must see his positive relationship with Jesus. More importantly, it has to be readily apparent; it shouldn’t be the audience’s job to assume as much. I never saw any love, or even a hint of friendship, between Jesus and Judas in the 2000 production. Judas’ interactions with Jesus were a constant barrage of aggression, overt or covert. No hint of a conflict in him, or at least none the audience could see, and what use is a conflict or emotion if the audience isn’t privy to it?
- And when not telegraphing an ultra-specific view of the story’s events, everything else about the design would’ve left a first-time viewer befogged. Young me liked the industrial, post-apocalyptic, pseudo-Gotham City atmosphere of the set. The older me still likes it (though I’m firm in my opinion it works best on stage), but realizes what a mess the costumes were. Jesus and the apostles are straight out of Rent, the Roman guards look like an army of Darth Vader clones with nightsticks substituting for light sabers, the priests have practically stepped off the screen from The Matrix, Pilate is a Gestapo in generic neo-Nazi regalia, Herod seems to have dragged along some showgirls and chorus boys on his visit from a flash-and-trash third-rate Vegas spectacular, the Temple is full of ethnic stereotypes and a mish-mosh of dime-store criminals, and a creepy mob with a striking resemblance to The Addams Family keeps popping up, but only in the show’s darker moments. Lots of interesting ideas which might work (operative word being “might”) decently in productions of their own, all tossed in to spice up a rather bland soup. The solution to having a bunch of conflicting ideas is not to throw all of them at the wall at once; you look for a pattern to present itself and follow it. If no pattern emerges from the ideas you have, it’s a sign you should start over.
You can see what my basic issue was: where other productions explored motivation, examining possibilities and presenting conflicting viewpoints for consideration, the 2000 production (when not utterly confused in its storytelling thanks to conflicting design) blatantly stated what it thought the motivation was without any room for interpretation — this is who they are, what they did, why they did it, so switch off your brain and accept what we put in front of you. Which, to me, is the total opposite of what JCS is about; it didn’t get famous for espousing that view, but for going totally against the grain of that.
The national tour at least had Carl and Barry to recommend for it the first time around, but for all the mistakes it corrected about the 2000 revival (swapping out the shady market in the Temple for a scene where stockbrokers worshiped the almighty dollar, with an electronic ticker broadcasting then-topical references to Enron, ImClone, and Viagra, among others, was a fun twist, and, for me, Barry Dennen gave the definitive performance of Herod), it introduced some confusing new ones as well:
- For one, Carl — and, later, his replacement, Lawrence Clayton — looked twice the age of the other actors onstage. Granted, Christ was only 33 when this happened, but next to both Carl and Clayton, Eric Kunze (I thankfully never caught his predecessor) looked almost like a teenager. When Ted and Carl did the show in the Nineties and both were in their fifties, they were past the correct ages for their characters, but it worked — in addition to their being terrific performers and friends in real life whose chemistry was reflected onstage — because they were around the same age, so it wasn’t so glaring. Without that dynamic, the way Jesus and Judas looked together just seemed weird, and it didn’t help anyone accept their relationship.
- Speaking of looking weird together, the performer playing Caiaphas — who was bald, and so, unfortunately, resembled a member of the Blue Man Group thanks to the color of lighting frequently focused on the priests — was enormously big and tall, while the actor in the role of Annas was extremely short. Big Guy, Little Guy in action. Every time I saw them onstage, I had to stifle the urge to laugh out loud. I’ve written a great deal about how Caiaphas and Annas are not (supposed to be) the show’s villains, but that’s still not the reaction I should have to them.
- The relentlessness of pace was ridiculous. It was so fast that the show, which started at 1:40 PM, was down by 3:30 PM — and that included a 20-minute intermission. What time does that leave for any moments to be taken at all? A scene barely even ended before the next began. At the end of the Temple scene, Jesus threw all the lepers out, rolled over, and Mary was singing the “Everything’s Alright” reprise already. How about a second to breathe for Mary to get there? Nope. How about giving Judas and Jesus two seconds’ break in the betrayal scene at Gethsemane? The guards were already grabbing Christ the minute he was kissed. I was so exhausted by the show’s end that I was tempted to holler at the stage to please slow down for a minute. The pace didn’t allow for any moment in the show to be completed if it was ever begun; it was just too fast to take advantage of subtle touches the actors could’ve had, and as a result, I think they were unable to build even a general emotional connection because one certainly didn’t come across.
- The cast was uniformly talented singing-wise, with excellent ranges and very accomplished voices. (In fact, the second time around, the woman understudying Mary, Darlesia Cearcy, walked away with the whole show in my opinion, and I’m incredibly glad to have seen her career take off since then.) But, in addition to some being more concerned with singing the notes on the page because they were there than imbuing them with emotion and motivation, the cast was undercut by the choices that production made with the music. For one, there’s a huge difference between singing “words and notes” and singing “lyrics and phrases.” When you have a phrase like “Ah, gentlemen, you know why we are here / We’ve not much time, and quite a problem here…” you sing the sentence, and if sometimes a word needs to be spoken, you do that. You don’t make sure you hit every single note like a “money note” (which you hit and hold as long as you can to make sure everyone hears it), dragging out the tempo to hang on to each note as long as you can. Generally, the actors were so busy making sure every note was sung — and worse, sung like a money note — that they missed the point of singing a phrase, and how to use one to their advantage. Caiaphas and Pilate were particularly egregious offenders. (I’ve never understood some of these conductors who are so concerned that every note written has to be sung. The result suffers from it.)
And then there’s Ted’s production. Of the three, it’s the one I liked the most, but that’s not saying much when it was better by default.
- The production design was stripped-down, the set limited to a bridge, some steps, a stage deck with some levels, and a couple of drops (and a noose) that were “flown in.” The costumes were simple, the sound was very well-balanced, and the lighting was the icing on the cake. Combined, the story they told was clear.
- The music sounded very full, considering the pit consisted of a five-piece band relying in part on orchestral samples.
- Ted, for being of advanced age, was in terrific form vocally, if his acting fell back a little much on huge, obvious, emotive gestures and choices (the film, through editing and close-ups, gave these choices more subtlety than they were allowed onstage, where it came perilously close to resembling a “Mr. Jesus” pageant in which contestants were graded on their ability to strike all the appropriate poses from Renaissance paintings).
- And there were some beautiful stage pictures; for example, there was a drop with an image of a coin with Caesar’s head on it in the Temple scene, and it fell on the crowd when Jesus cleared out the riff-raff. In the leper sequence that followed, the chorus’ heads popped out of holes in the cloth, under which they undulated, pulsing to the beat, and rather than being treated as a literal mob scene, the sequence had a very dream-like effect, a mass of lost souls reaching out to Christ. It was rather like a Blake painting, with a creepy vibe in a different manner from the typical “physically overwhelm him” approach; they frankly looked like a monster rising to eat him. He didn’t interact with them, didn’t even turn to look at them, until finally, he whipped around with a banishing thrust of his arm, hollering “Heal yourselves!” Sometimes it was over-acted with annoying character voices (remember, I saw this four times), but when it wasn’t, the effect was chilling.
My main beef with the show was, oddly enough, on a similar line to my beef with Gale Edwards’ production: it drew lines in the sand. But in this case, it drew them concerning Jesus’ divinity.
As written, JCS deals with Jesus as if he were only a man and not the Son of God. The show never suggests that Jesus isn’t divine, but neither does it reinforce the view that he is. Portrayed in detail in JCS is the mostly-unexplored human side: ecstasy and depression, trial and error, success and regret. He agonizes over his fate, is often unsure of his divinity, and rails at God. Not so in this production. Aside from “The Temple” and “Gethsemane,” there was never any room for doubt that Jesus was the mystical, magic man portrayed in the Gospels.
At the top of the show, after a fight between his followers and the Romans during the overture (a popular staging choice I’m not a real fan of, but you’ve got to do something during that moment in a fully staged version, and I understand why it’s an easy choice to make for exposition purposes), Jesus made his majestic entrance, spotlit in robes that looked whiter than Clorox bleach could produce, and raised a man from the dead. Well, where’s the room for Judas to doubt? Clearly “this talk of God is true,” we just saw it! If this guy is capable of performing miracles, try explaining to anyone that that person is “just a man”! (More than that, good luck explaining to someone who specializes in necromancy that fame has gone to his head and escaping unscathed… which sounds like an interesting idea for a story in and of itself…)
If that weren’t enough, Jesus went on to have a constant connection with God throughout the show, speaking to a spotlight that focused only on him and often served to distract him from anything else happening onstage, and at the end, during “John 19:41,” his body separated from the cross, which fell back into the stage, and he ascended to heaven.
Now, though the former was admittedly played to excess (some reviewers unkindly compared Neeley to a homeless man with Bluetooth), there are arguments to be made in favor of both choices: a Jesus who constantly seeks a connection with God that isn’t reciprocated, searching for guidance or at least a clue, is great foreshadowing for his eruption — and acceptance — in “Gethsemane.” As for the ascension, depending on how it’s staged, there’s room for argument that it could be interpreted more metaphorically than literally, as the moment when Jesus’ spirit is born, as Carl Anderson once put it (meaning, to me, that his message is given life and strength when his body fails him). But this production didn’t have that level of shading and layers to it and coupled with the resurrection at the start, it defeated the rest of the story.
None of ‘em’s perfect, and I don’t think I could create the perfect one. Thus, concert. I hope that clears it up!