Musical Mondays: Lloyd Webber
Jesus Christ Superstar
Scratching round for a meaningful musical anniversary, or more broadly a peg on which to hang this week’s ‘newsletter’, I made a brief diversion into a news report only to be confronted by the name of Lord Lloyd-Webber.1 This was unexpected.
What do I do now?
Could we start again, please…
And lo! Providence once again comes to my rescue.
JCS was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway debut, in 1971 when he was a mere stripling of 23. As The Onion would later put it, “rock opera makes Christianity appear briefly hip,” what with this and Godspell surfing a 1960s wave of hippie Jesus.
Still, it’s easy to forget what a bold venture this was in 1971, not unlike the controversy raised by Dorothy Sayers’ WWII radio play-cycle The Man Born to be King, in which Christ spoke words not actually recorded in the Gospels. JCS began as a studio recording that sold so well in the US that a production was almost rushed onto Broadway, a production so very rock (and notoriously so) that it seemed almost a rival to Hair but with better source material.
I’m not a great fan of rock opera in general and it’s difficult for me not to be theologically and scripturally picky, but the show’s significance can be judged by the space given to it by Ethan Mordden in One More Kiss. Mordden’s histories cover a lot of ground, so the five pages allotted to JCS is some tribute. Much of the praise is due to the novelty, not only of a more vernacular treatment of the Passion, but of the musicality that Lloyd Webber brought to the rock. “It is almost as though the music were scared and the subject profane,” muses Mordden, adding later the bold statement that the structure has “a quality that marks all the great operas from Wagner to Britten.”
Blimey.
Dramatically, shifting the focus to the relationship between Jesus and Judas makes sense, although Tim Rice has to fill in gaps the evangelists (understandably) left in the story.2 To my taste, the nervousness and stress in the score drifts into the hysterical, in much the same way that Hamilton eventually lessens its own impact, but I am conscious that this particular week in Jerusalem was probably not marked by the equivalent of English middle-class choral harmony.
Rice’s preparedness to treat the material with respect but not necessarily reverence, his understanding that these were real people in extraordinary circumstances, is one of the show’s great strengths.3 Mary’s songs are fine character pieces, from the “gently jazzy” ‘Everything’s Alright’ to the troubled ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him.’ The former misses the symbolic import of anointing Jesus’ feet, but that works rather well in terms of character progression:
“Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to
Problems that upset you, oh.
Don't you know
Everything's alright, yes, everything's fine.
And we want you to sleep well tonight.
Let the world turn without you tonight.
If we try, we'll get by, so forget all about us tonight”
Those are the words of a fan who wants to (as we might now say) ‘de-stress’ her new hero, but by the time of the latter Mary has become more aware of who Jesus is. He’s not “just a man.”
“I don't know how to love him.
What to do, how to move him.
I've been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, when I've seen myself,
I seem like someone else.”
That, whether Rice intended it or not, in a nutshell is the result of encounter with Christ, and naturally leads to my favourite number in the show. Without doing too much Ignatian devotion and placing ourselves in the situation, ‘Could We Start Again, Please?’ is the reasonable question any loyal follower, in this case Peter and Mary, might ask when they see the movement getting a little out of hand:
“I've been living to see you.
Dying to see you, but it shouldn't be like this.
This was unexpected,
What do I do now?
Could we start again please?
I've been very hopeful, so far.
Now for the first time, I think we're going wrong.”
I often think Tim Rice sometimes threw words together without much sense of the coherent whole, but “dying to see you” is superb. It’s a perfectly natural everyday expression, but the alarming prospect of literally dying to see Jesus throws their professed devotion into sharp relief.
‘Gethsemane’ is Arian heresy, I’m afraid, but the quatrain at the heart of the title song is a neat distillation of the questions provoked by the Passion:
“Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,
Who are you? What have you sacrificed?
Jesus Christ Superstar,
Do you think you're what they say you are?”
‘Pilate’s Dream’ is an effective sixteen-line soliloquy spoiled by Rice’s carelessness: nobody says “leaving me the blame,” as if blame were a bar bill. Mordden complains that ‘King Herod’s Song’ is disconnected from the rest of the show, as if JCS were a 1920s show in which a vaudeville performer were given a ‘spot’, but I don’t see the problem. Herod doesn’t have much to do with the narrative even in the gospels and his louche, decadent treatment of Jesus as travelling entertainment seems reasonable for a satrap who is all-powerful and yet impotent, as Roman satraps tended to be. To be fair to Mordden, he prefers the ensembles because they are doing more of the work than the once-and-future audition pieces, but the solos are a better-than-average set.
The place of JCS in musical history is not because it launched a cultural revival of Christianity. It is, obviously, because it launched Andrew Lloyd Webber (and Tim Rice) on Broadway, but also because it made the rock opera a viable entity. “Pop music is swell for rock concerts,” groused Stephen Sondheim. “Whether they are rock concerts called Hair or Jesus Christ Superstar or rock concerts called rock concerts doesn’t matter. But when it comes to telling a story through character, then I think it’s useless.”
This is the standard complaint about ‘sung-through’ musicals, Les Mis included, whether they are ‘rock’ or not. But they are often sound and fury, as though yelling the audience into submission was evidence of a job well done.4 This is my objection to Hamilton and Six - well, one of my objections to Six - but JCS, rather like Jesus Himself, can hardly be blamed for everything that followed. Besides, Lloyd Webber and Rice don’t make very convincing rockers. Rather, as Mark Steyn observes, the composer “deploys genuine rock elements as astutely as they’ve ever been used in drama… Superstar is that rare thing, a rock musical which tries to use rock to differentiate character.”5
Jesus Christ Superstar isn’t blasphemous or even particularly critical and, from that perspective, is a valuable and (forgive the phrase) culturally enriching version of “the most influential week in the history of Western Civilization” (Mordden). The innovative music and - mostly - carefully-crafted lyrics marked a genuinely new development in musical theatre. The OTT Broadway production was followed by a sparser, more congruent West End version that ran for years and set the stage for further productions. There was still glitz, of course; it’s called Jesus Christ Superstar, after all, but the drama isn’t buried beneath the bombast.
To be clear, the hyphen came with the peerage.
As did Sayers.
The benefit of attending a High Anglican public school?
The rise of the rock opera paralleled the rise of political and social discourse in which emotion displayed was regarded as commensurate with sincerity and credibility. (Discuss).
Broadway Babies Say Goodnight