Jesus Christ Superstar, which begins a six-week run in Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre on Friday, packs a huge spiritual punch and raises some very pertinent questions about the founder of Christianity.
It is nearly 50 years since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s intense rock opera first burst on to the scene. It began life as an album, recorded in November 1969 in the aftermath of John Lennon’s comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Plans to cast Lennon as Jesus and Yoko Ono as Mary Magdalene in a production at St Paul’s Cathedral sadly never materialised — nor did a proposed opening of the show with a one-off performance on the stage used for the Passion play in Oberammergau, Bavaria.
Rice got the idea for the title from a description of Tom Jones in Melody Maker as “the World’s No 1 Superstar”. He was also inspired by a question in a Bob Dylan song as to whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side. Judas’s betrayal is an essential element in the story of Jesus’s Passion and death. Jesus Christ Superstar tells that story from the point of view of Judas, portrayed as the most intelligent of the disciples, who is worried that Jesus has got too big for his boots and let the adulation that greets him to distort his teaching and his message.
Judas is portrayed as a much stronger character than the angst-ridden Jesus, who acts at times like a petulant teenager, telling the crowds of cripples and beggars gathered round him to go away, losing his temper with his disciples and haranguing God in the Gethsemane song, in which he describes himself as “sad and tired” and begs that the cup of poison may be taken away from him, but ultimately accepts that if it is what God wants he will face death by crucifixion.
Jesus Christ Superstar follows the biblical Passion narratives pretty faithfully. Rice made much use of Life of Christ by the American Catholic archbishop Fulton Sheen for its calibration of the four Gospel writers’ accounts of the last weeks of Jesus’s life. Seeing the show has brought several nonbelievers to Christianity and also rekindled the faith of many who had fallen away from churchgoing. The key factor seems to be its portrayal of Jesus as a very human figure, stripped of the mythology and miracles that so often surround him in more conventional Christian versions of his story. It is his human weakness and agonising that appeals to those who are put off by more reverential treatments.
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Rice has written that “we tried to humanise Christ because, for me, I find Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels as a God a very unrealistic figure”. For all his angst, the Jesus of the musical is a figure who clearly inspires devotion, not least from Mary Magdalene, whose haunting ballad I Don’t Know How to Love Him captures her sense of simultaneously being scared by and deeply attracted to him.
Recent productions have emphasised the theme of social justice and portrayed Jesus and his disciples primarily as political and economic agitators. In the 2012 arena tour, Ben Forster’s Jesus raised a huge red flag, like the one waved by the student revolutionaries in the ABC Café in Les Misérables. In the open-air production in Regent’s Park, Declan Bennett, the singer-songwriter, makes much more of Jesus’s spiritual intensity and anguish. The theme of sacrifice is enhanced by a huge, illuminated red cross lying on the ground.
Jesus Christ Superstar provides a powerful retelling of the Passion story that is just as dramatic, thought-provoking and profound as those by JS Bach, and certainly more theologically challenging. The questions raised in the title song as to who Jesus Christ is and what he has sacrificed get to the very heart of the Christian faith. I would urge anyone who has missed it over the past five decades to go — you will not be in for a relaxing evening or an easy listen, but you will be challenged with penetrating and disturbing theological questions.
Ian Bradley is principal of St Mary’s College, St Andrews University