Jesus Christ Superstar

On Easter 2018, NBC broadcast live (and with many, many commercial interruptions), the cantata Jesus Christ Superstar with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The show was written in 1970, but isn't long in the tooth -- in fact, it revives with a lot of its sound and fury intact.  This production featured John Legend as Jesus and Alice Cooper in the relatively minor role of King Herod -- these were the headliners.  In fact, the cantata focuses on Judas, played with muscular aplomb by the charismatic Brandon Victor Dixon, who gets both the first and last words on the proceedings.  Judas provides commentary on the somewhat opaque actions of Jesus, facilitates the crucifixion, and expresses the doubts that the viewers, if not too blinkered by blind faith, should harbor.  In this conception, Judas is resurrected, not Jesus Christ. 

The broadcast sets the action against a vast colonnaded wall, something like the weathered and decrepit façade of the Roman coliseum.  The walls are painted with badly faded and spalling frescos -- they look like murals by Mantegna and Giotto.  During the opening number, a guy with a hose attached to a pressurized canister of red paint shoots the letters J-E-S-U-S onto the wall as graffiti.  Christ and the apostles are dressed more or less as might you remember them from Sunday School.  Caiaphas and other representations of the Jewish establishment wear Darth Vadar black and scuttle about like malevolent black beetles. Mary Magdalene is the only female role -- she lounges about dressed like a renaissance Virgin.  Herod wears gold lame and cavorts flamboyantly after the manner of a Las Vegas lounge singer.  It's fairly impressive:  the music alternates between a sort of narcotized complacency and total frenzy.  Lloyd Weber and Rice are good with complacency:  highlights in the cantata in that mode include "Everything's Alright". "I don't know how to love  him," (the showstopper ballad for Mary Magdalene) and the Hosanna song.  Screaming guitars and repeated, percussive licks enact the frenzied part of the score -- this is the febrile, jarring music that leads up to, and is effectively resolved, by the triumphant theme song, "Superstar."  This production featured a lot of dancing, the less said about that aspect of the show the better.  There was a huge chorus but they didn't have much to do other than slap one another on the back, hug, or engage in dry-humping after running to and fro across the huge set.  Both Judas and Jesus, periodically, have to sing in a very high, falsetto register -- as the show progressed their high notes became increasingly strained, raw, and unpleasant.  You can only shout at the top of your lungs for so long.  Alice Cooper's appearance taunting Jesus with the pastiche song "Try and See" was a highlight -- but's it's short and Cooper, obviously a favorite with the audience, isn't on stage long enough to make a strong impression.  The live audience spent much of the production up on their feet howling loudly -- this gives an impression of the "superstar" aspect of the show; the audience is part of the show, ginning up enthusiasm for the (putatively) sacred Superstar who is, in effect, nothing more than a media phenomenon, a plaything of the mob.  The continuous shrieking, however, was painful to my ears and made it hard to decipher many of the witty lyrics.  As the show stretched into plus two-hours -- due to the incessant commercial interruptions -- there were some longuers.  However, the cantata redeems itself with some mighty and Wagnerian excess during its last few minutes, ending more or less on a soft note with a final string quartet that fiddles the show out to its agnostic ending.  (In the closing credits, we can see Andrew Lloyd Webber glimpsed briefly as a kind of gargoyle on the huge scaffolding against the Coliseum façade.)