Jesus Christ Superstar: Chicago Lyric Opera

Thank you for this. I am eagerly awaiting the towns/dates for the tour to be announced. Hope that San Francisco is on the list.

My two cents:

* It's got that slick polish that Webber needlessly sticks on most revivals of this show -- clean, more "pop"-sounding than "rock," kind of like most new-wave JCS in that respect.

* The orchestra has a very full sound because, for once, it is a very full orchestra (only an opera house has the kind of funding to pull that off).

* Singing-wise, this blows the NBC special out of the damn water. I like that they cast performers who can actually sing the score and aren't afraid to riff if they feel like it. Heath Saunders in particular turns in an excellent performance as Jesus, all in all; he brings an interesting swagger and refreshing R&B vibe to the role, while not skimping on the rock screams. Not afraid to really loosen the hinges on the ad-libbing, too. Ryan Shaw as Judas is a little low-energy in his movement and demeanor, but the voice more than makes up for it. Absolutely unreal. Sings the score with ease, and adds some unique and exciting flare in a way other performers in recent productions didn't. Mykal Kilgore's interpretation of Simon was also a surprising stand-out; the show is already worth seeing twice, but he would be the reason I buy another ticket. It took me a long time to return my full attention to the show after his number. I wasn't surprised to hear that he had played Judas in the recent all-black production in Aurora; if he takes over the role on tour, Carl Anderson (may he rest) and Ben Vereen have finally met their damn match.

* "King Herod's Song," though... what in blue hell was that? I was scared. I was confused. It felt like a fever dream; I can honestly say I've never seen that onstage before. If I had to pinpoint one thing to fix before this hits the road, it would be to redo the costuming and portrayal of that character entirely. It is jarringly out of place.

* As for the staging and design... meh. I liked some artistic decisions they made, but nothing to write home about. I just... didn't really feel anything. A lot of newer productions of JCS suffer from this; I think they're so shallow and glitzy that at times the show itself has ceased to mean anything. It's pretty much what Judas warns against in the story - style and personality devouring substance. I'm open to new interpretations, but this is a Disney-fied, stripped down version of the show. It will never be the offensive, boundary-pushing thing it was because the times are different, but it should be more imaginative than this. This is like Wicked-levels of empty spectacle. (And that's not just JCS, it's a general problem; lately people have too often conflated density of spectacle with quality. This is across the board, from Hollywood to Broadway.) As Mr. Rogers once said, "Deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex." A "less is more" JCS is not particularly innovative, but that's still what I would really like to see in the future.

Updated On: 5/11/18 at 11:26 AM

I thought Work Light did both Equity and non-Equity.

Okay, finally getting back to this. I really wish the old draft had stayed in existence, because I feel like it explained it so much better than I'm about to. (I hate being a perfectionist who labors over his words, gets them right, and then realizes too late that "tab discarding" occurred; if Chrome does this to you, too, folks, and you think it sucks, here's how to turn it off [first answer at the link, starts with "The OP is right"].)

* The sound of the score: your response seems to indicate you're paying attention to the orchestra, not the vocals. I'm referring primarily to the vocal sound, which is rather "clean" for my taste, bordering on "plastic." They hit the notes, they do some impressive acrobatics, but it doesn't sound all that rock. The older versions have... I dunno what to call it... depth? Texture? Grit? "Dirt"? Whatever you call it, it's a rawer, more "authentic" sound, if you will, than the contemporary theater pop that we get in most of Webber's productions of JCS. (Whenever he's in charge, he tends to pick someone who sounds more like Steve Balsamo than, say, Ian Gillan or Ted Neeley.) Taste is subjective, but in my opinion, I'd rather hear a more rock-influenced sound in the vocals. As I said elsewhere on this board criticizing the NBC special, die-hard JCS fans, especially in America, want their Jesus and Judas to be willing to cough up a lung for them in the course of the show. I didn't get that sound here; a little too "effortless," for lack of a better word. (Except for Jo Lampert, who really delivered on the sound, and at times reminded me of the best days of Janis Joplin; I admit I actually wasn't that big a fan of her look, it felt a little "trying too hard to make Mary edgy" like Mel C's dreadlocks in the 2012 arena tour, but it didn't detract from her performance.)

Re: the Nineties tour you refer to twice: yes, it was painfully over-amplified, especially in the non-union portion, and some people admittedly croaked their way through more tender moments, but the screaming was spot on, going back to the Brown Album. That's the way it's supposed to sound. You're supposed to think that any minute this performer is gonna make rocks crawl out of their throat. That's where the passion, thrill, and excitement of this score comes from.

* Herod: I sympathize with the notion that either "leather and ass-less chaps" Herod or "Elvis" Herod, depending on when you caught that tour, was not particularly inventive. The former in particular irks me; a lot of productions cop out on how best to portray this comic relief role by inexplicably making Herod gay, when part of Herod's reputation of decadence in the Bible comes from the fact that he stole his sister-in-law from his brother and then openly lusted after her teenage daughter. Just because it's got a vaguely vaudeville / music-hall sound, doesn't mean the best route is to send him out there with rouge, mascara, painted nails, and platform heels, as Tom O'Horgan did in the original, setting the standard for decades of missing the boat. (Funny I bring up O'Horgan; Herod's costume in this one kind of reminds me of what photos I've seen of the glittery "chrysalis" number Jeff Fenholt wore in O'Horgan's "Superstar" sequence.) And I also agree, reading between the lines (hopefully correctly), that Herod's number should not be just comic relief; there needs to be some scary, dangerous, and disturbing about it, or "Hey! Aren't you scared of me, Christ?" will just sound ridiculous. But this leaned too heavily into scary, dangerous, and disturbing territory for me; it needs to be funny too. Herod is trivial, insignificant, shallow, inconsequential, a puppet. He thinks he has power, but Rome has stripped him of what power the title of "King" might have had. Let's also not forget that JCS uses "King Herod" as shorthand for a different figure than the King Herod you're thinking of; the Herod who put up Rome's eagle above the Temple gate and massacred the innocents in Bethlehem is a different Herod from his son, Herod Antipas, who passed judgment on Jesus and beheaded John the Baptist (hence the skull necklace, which I thought was a creepy but interesting touch). Herod the Great would radiate power; Herod Antipas was just the 1st century Trump, a debauched bloke with a mostly empty title and a palace, sitting around smoking and drinking all the time with a lot of women around him, a grotesque man playing at being king. Which brings me back to my initial point: there needs to be an element of play, afternoon amusement for a bored rich man who thinks he knows everything and cares not a whit for the people. We get enough tyranny with the way Pilate treats Jesus.

* Staging/design: We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I left feeling kind of empty. It didn't really resonate with me emotionally. "Stripped down" and "glitzy" may seem like a contradiction in terms to you, but let me explain what I meant. True, it wasn't a production where you saw all the dollars on stage, with camels and donkeys ****ting all over the place, sheep and goats jostling with hookers in the Temple, bed-sheets and swords in a "stunning lifelike recreation of ancient Jerusalem," but to me, it still felt shallow and lacking in substance and a little too polished, hence "glitzy." "Stripped down," for me, didn't refer to production values, but to not going the extra mile in terms of, for example, establishing relationships between the characters; it was all surface. To illustrate that particular point: say what you will about the Nineties tour, but (perhaps due to their longevity in the roles) I really got the sense of Jesus and Judas' friendship, and how much it hurt them that it was going astray, from Ted Neeley and Carl Anderson more than almost any other performers I've seen in the roles. Productions like this one start from square one with Judas as an outsider, where you almost wonder why and how he stuck around so damn long if he's this disillusioned and detached from the group. He and Jesus shoot glares at each other like they murdered each other's pets. Okay, anger is valid, but it came from something. Where's the sincerity? Show me more than anger. Show me despair, show me disappointment, show me depth. Yes, it's a little ridiculous that Ted Neeley is pushing 80 within the next five years and still playing Jesus (now in Europe), but they aren't just hiring him for sentimental value. They're hiring him because he doesn't have to be taught how to play this role, the way newer performers have to be. He's been in the trenches. He knows how the role (and the show) works, and what is meant to be accomplished in the telling of this story, which is more than I could say for some of what I saw on that stage.

Oh, and as for "Superstar," questioning Jesus' choices is part of it; Judas, after all, is a hallucination conjured up by a delirious Jesus. But that's not all. Judas' raison d'être throughout the show is that he doesn't like what Jesus is becoming -- a "superstar," a shallow, hyped personality worshiped merely for the hype like many celebrities today. The messenger has become more important than the philosophical message he wished to convey. To Judas, Jesus lost his stature as philosopher when he gained his status as superstar. That's the other driving point of the song: style and personality have devoured substance, that's a huge part of his beef with what Jesus is doing throughout the show, and if Jesus is honest with himself, he fears that as much as Judas ("Would the things I've said and done / Matter anymore?" comes to mind). One wishes those producing the show so often would learn from that lesson.

Updated On: 5/13/18 at 10:02 AM

I'll grant you that some of the vocal showboating on that tour was excessive (there's audio proof from closing night in the apparently unlikely event you'll want to walk down memory lane), but it had the right sound. A happy medium, in my opinion, can be achieved without sacrificing the "grit." Even though I don't particularly care for the specific pop sound of some of the Chicago cast's voices, it is proof that one can hit those notes eight times a week without having a brain hemorrhage through the nose. Singing it with technique but making it sound "dirty" isn't wholly impossible.

(With regard to Neeley, what "prior rock reputation"? He himself is the first to admit he got a record deal at 22 with his hometown band, they put out one album and maybe a handful of singles that went nowhere, he auditioned for Hair on a whim and got the gig, that led to JCS, and aside from a few stints in other rock musicals, some bit parts on film, touring as part of bigger artists' bands, and attempting to launch his own projects with varying degrees of success, JCS is his "rock reputation." That's why I said some of it is due to being cast because he starred in the film, but now that that novelty has worn off for the most part [again, except in Europe], the only conclusion I can come to is that you don't have to teach a dog to sit again when you've already taught it once. And people buy tickets to his performances, as opposed to Webber's productions, in droves -- that Nineties tour grossed over $140 million in its four-year run -- because they know what to expect and that they won't be disappointed.)

As for Herod, think back to that Brown Album. There was no "Could We Start Again Please?" or any of the extras that came with later stage renditions and the film. It sounds deliberately out of step with the rest of the score for a reason: this kind of raucous, blackly comic, British music hall song and dance number breaks the tension for a moment. It's supposed to. It's comic relief that also moves the story forward. On record, it's a release before you go back to the deaths of Judas and, eventually, Jesus. (Indeed, there are some die-hard Brown Album purists in the JCS fan community who intensely dislike "Could We Start Again" because they think there's already been a tension break, and having another one so close to Herod's scene is belaboring the point.)

But what works on a record doesn't work as well on stage. They realized the score was only roughly an hour and a half long, and they needed to add some stuff so it didn't feel so short. (It didn't work; Act I always goes by in a whirlwind no matter what production I see.) Realizing Mary Magdalene sort of disappears in the second half of Act II, and recognizing that on a stage going from the comic relief number straight to (literal) suicide causes a severe case of mood whiplash, they slotted in "Could We Start Again." But that doesn't mean Herod's number was supposed to be any less funny, even if the particular style of humor wasn't broad comedy. The number needs balance, and I feel the Chicago version tipped the scales a little too far into the more disturbing side of it.

You're correct, "the perils of style devouring substance" is not the sole (I think it is a pretty big part of it, but not the only one) message of the show itself. But, to be quite frank, I don't believe the show's message has anything to do with Jesus accomplishing -- or even being right about -- anything (or, conversely, being wrong). That's something the individual audience member brings to it; we all have our "piece of the true cross."

It's by no means a religious story, it's not about Christ's suffering (except that it deals with the literal circumstances of torture and execution), and it's certainly not about the question of Jesus' divinity (Tim Rice didn't believe he was the Son of God, and in the show, the question is deliberately left open). Rice and Webber began with the idea of writing a musical about Judas, in which Jesus was only a minor character. Granted, that's not exactly what they ended up with, but Judas is still the protagonist. He's the most fully drawn character in the show, certainly more so than Jesus. This is a story, told from Judas' point of view, about Jesus as a subversive political activist and the brutal and terrified response of the authorities, and among many themes, it deals with the peril of the "cult of personality." If that isn't adequately conveyed, it's one more point a production missed.

Hey, I welcome in-depth conversation as much as anyone! I concur, almost none of Webber's work gets this level of attention, and really the only thing stopping most people who write about theater from doing so is the prevailing level of condescension assumed by the cognoscenti. It's as worthy of analysis as anything else in theater.

Updated On: 5/14/18 at 10:01 AM