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nym_wibblyI struggled with today's Snowflake Challenge - to share a favourite piece of canon! A lifetime of avid media-consuming... how can I possibly pick a favourite? So I started typing the candidates into Youtube's search as they entered my head, and settled on the first one that I could embed as a decent quality vid or audio. It's shocking how many of my "moments" aren't on Youtube, or any official site, or... anywhere.
So, musicals. Jesus Christ Superstar - the 2000 studio movie version, which was a restaging of the contemporary tour. Its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, is probably best known for Phantom of the Opera. I'm not sure what its lyricist, Tim Rice, is best known for these days. I've followed his career avidly, and never got the sense that any one piece has defined his career. Perhaps it's this one.
As musicals go, Superstar is hard to stage. For one thing, you can't very well go and slap a feelgood megamix or uplifting encore at the end (as was the revival trend at this time) having just crucified Jesus live on stage. It's a dark piece, reflective and painful to watch, and while the audience may go away humming the tunes, it's not a feelgood story. It's a human story about the best and worst in humanity. We see the story of Judas betraying Jesus, the trial, and the crucifixion, in purely human terms. These are men (and one woman) with bonds and fears and hopes and politics and dreams, and Superstar asks the eternal Christian question about free will vs predestination without answering it. Either Judas willfully betrays Christ for his own reasons, or he's a helpless pawn in a pre-ordained set piece where he loses everything in order to fulfil his deity's plan for humanity - he's a victim. It's a depth that too often gets lost when Superstar goes touring around the regions on a shoestring budget; which I think was lost in the first Superstar movie, in spite of a bold effort to ground the story in gritty daily life. Afraid to get into the emotion - the passion in the Passion Play - producers and directors often try to keep the production lightweight. They still, after all these decades, want to avoid the risk of giving offence to those for whom the story of the crucifixion is a matter of faith.
I remember the tail-end of the original bunfight about whether Jesus Christ Superstar, in and of itself, is blasphemous. I wouldn't call it irreverent or disrespectful of faith - no more so than a book simplifying the Gospels for young readers with some cartoonish pictures, or staging the Oberammergau tableaux or a nativity scene. Part of the controversy came from the way Superstar shows Judas - or rather his dilemma - in a compassionate light. Judas isn't the boo-hiss villain of the New Testament but a disciple who lost his way or - if you take the Calvinist view of predestination in Christianity - was an instrument of the highest power there is. Another aspect of the controversy centred on demonising the Jewish people by making them the baying mob in the last act, but Superstar retells that aspect of the Biblical tale accurately; the Jewish religious authorities find Jesus's well-meaning movement political and inconvenient and want something done. Pilate, acting for the occupying Romans, doesn't want the political hot potato of sentencing Jesus - a Jew with a following of folks who consider him a prophet, teacher, and potential messiah - to death, so sends him to Jewish leader Herod. Herod nopes and sends the problem back to Pilate, who ultimately acts and has Jesus executed. It's a story about leaders losing their backbone in the face of public pressure, perhaps, but the fact that the public happen to be the people of Jerusalem is irrelevant in terms of the story's moral finger-pointing. Superstar draws out the human element in these men as much as in Jesus and his followers. Herod's song is the comic relief of the piece, and he's usually played as a grotesque, but in terms of the storyline the song is a man's fear-grin plastered over his terror. He's not laughing. Like Pilate, he wants no part of this hot mess, but does what's expedient.
There's nothing bold or groundbreaking in the storyline of Jesus Christ Superstar - it's an abridged version, but faithful to canon, as it were. But it has a wider message. It shows the dangers of celebrity - it was the growing popularity and influence of Jesus's movement that alarmed the local authorities, and the mob turned against him - and asks the question, what would happen if the same story played out now, today, in a world of mass media? Again, the piece doesn't try to answer that question; it just holds up a reflecting mirror to today's politics, today's cults, today's witch-hunts, and today's certainties. Unless the human race does a lot of growing up really fast, Superstar will be relevant for generations to come, just as it's been relevant to "today" my whole life.
But this is all by the by.
My favourite for the purposes of Snowflake is this particular production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and this particular actor, Jerome Pradon, playing the conflicted role of Judas to Glenn Carter's startlingly stroppy Jesus in a way that I feel is brilliant. This particular scene - The Last Supper - in which the conflict between the two men comes to a head, to the horror of Jesus's other disciples. I've seen the role of Judas played slick, angry, bitter, cold, entitled, and in-denial. Pradon plays it as pure frustration and a building agony, adding a horrible plausibility to the eventual suicide. In this production it isn't shame or fear that drives Judas to hang himself, but love - a love he betrays with a kiss. A love Jesus reciprocates even as their friendship, their brotherhood, falls apart during the Last Supper and they end up screaming at one another in a plea for this to just not be happening.
Christianity believes that Jesus is the son of God - divine and divinely inspired. The Bible says he's a human being as well - one whose faith wavers as he nears the ghastly ending of his short tenure in the flesh. He's afraid. He's lonely. He doubts. In Gethsemane (in Superstar, the title of a song as well as the setting), he argues with himself and calls out to his god for enough strength to go through with the eternal plan. Like Judas, he begs for this not to be happening, for a way out, but then makes his peace with his fate and goes to face it. And the ending doesn't pull its punches - his fate is sickening. We endure every stroke of the whipping as Pilate counts the strokes out loud. We see Jesus crucified before Judas asks us, in the piece's titular song, Did it have to happen this way? If he showed up here, today, in your world of mass media, soundbyte, spin, and alternate truth, would anything be different? What would you do?
Whether or not one has a faith, even if one's faith is outraged by this portrayal of religious figures as fictionalised characters, I think that's a question worth asking.
The 2000 production plays all the emotions raw and unapologetic. That's why it blew me away. I'm sorry to say that I didn't get the chance to see it live, but I did buy the VHS as soon as the studio movie version was released. I remember watching it with my mouth hanging open. Studio productions, movie adaptations of musicals tend to lack something - the power, the presence of live performers giving you their soul for an hour and a half. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables... those just didn't quite capture the magic of the theatre. For me, this production of Superstar captured it, distilled it, and nailed it to my heart. Maybe it's a little OTT, laying it on a little thick. Maybe I wince at the sight of a blond eyed, blue-haired, pretty white dude playing Christ. But in terms of staging, the arrangement of the score, the fabulous meaty chorus, the sheer attention to detail in capturing the actors as they act and react as well as sing, this production is perfection.
The scene I've snagged from Youtube there had me sobbing on the floor as the human meaning of this story I've known all my life finally hit me. It hit the fannish spot, the characterisation spot, as well as my musicals-nerd button. So it might be a good thing that I didn't see these guys perform it live. Howling in the aisles is frowned upon in theatres (unless it's the Rocky Horror Show).
It's worth noting that I wasn't the only one who had this kind of reaction. And that some people took it further and saw slash there. And wrote it down. There were some amazing pieces trying to capture that love, and that agony as it falls apart, in terms of a slash relationship. Some made it sexual, others made it unrequited but without shame. I'd never seen fanfiction written about a musical before, let alone slash about Judas and the son of God. I can't deny my discomfort over that - I'm squirming with that peculiarly post-Christian-upbringing guilt, just remembering the fact that I read some of it - but neither can I deny that this particular production of Superstar had the "vibe" that slash fans used to latch onto in mainstream media, before the days when gay could be the canon without being the comic relief. It has the "buddy" relationship, combined with the "antagonists" trope, and wallows in the sheer depth of their personal connection through thick and thin, just as slash writers do. Sentinel. Star Trek. And Superstar.
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Date: 3 Jan 2019 22:34 (UTC)