Jesus Christ

inside

JESUS CHRIST

SUPERSTAR

We made him a type of Everyman. Judas did not think of himself as a traitor. He did what he did, not because he was basically evil, but because he was intelligent. He could se Christ becoming something he considered harmful to the Jews. Judas felt that they been persecuted enough. As far as what Christ was saying, general principles of how human beings should live together - Judas approved of this. What Judas was worried about was that as Christ got bigger and bigger and more popular, people began switching their attentions from what Christ was saying to Christ himself. They were saying that Jesus is God, here is the new Messiah, and Judas was terrified because, a.) he didn't agree with it - he thought Christ was getting out of control and it was affecting Him, and b.) Judas reckoned that if the movement got too big and people began worshipping Christ as a god, the Romans who were occupying Israel would come down and clobber them.

- Superstar lyricist Tim Rice

The play represents a confused and commercial portrait of Christ - a Christ that does not rise from the dead. Of course, the Christ the authors present would not have risen from the dead. They are not men of faith, and their statements only serve to undermine the scriptures. I have not seen the show, and my objections are based on what friends who have seen it tell me.

- Minister Dennis Miller, Calvary Baptist Church

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar set the world buzzing when it first appeared on vinyl in 1970 and on Broadway in 1971. The executives at MCA Records were terrified by it. In reaction to the single "Superstar," one MCA exec said, "A song like that will offend everyone." Another said, "If we put that record out, every churchman in the country will stone us." It made one secretary cry, who said, "It's sad when a company like Decca [owned by MCA] has to make money by making fun of Jesus!" Later on, the film's director Norman Jewison would say, "My hope is that audiences will take this for what it is - an opera, not history. These kids are trying to take Jesus off the stained-glass windows and get him down on the street. Some people are not going to like that." As author Robert Short put it, "It is a complete misunderstanding to view Jesus Christ Superstar as an expression of anyone's answer... Its purpose is, first, to put to Jesus the question we have today about the meaning of life, and second, to put this question in our own way of putting it." Tim Rice did with this story the same thing that clergy across America do every Sunday morning: remove it from its distant past and foreign culture and give it resonance and relevance to the issues and obstacles we face every day.

But today, Jesus Christ Superstar has been dumbed down, made palatable and comfortable, robbed of the rebellious, smartass attitude that originally made music and theatre history. Nearly forty years after its creation, it is time to return the piece to its rebel roots and allow Rice's aggressive text to offend, stun, shock, and disturb once again. Whether you're a Christian or not, this is an important side to an important story in world history, and it's a side rarely told anywhere else.

In setting the story of Judas' betrayal of Jesus for the modern stage, lyricist Tim Rice approached the story as political history instead of revealed scripture, and Jesus as radical political activist (mirroring the times) rather than as the son of God. This Jesus does not point the way to God half as much as he points the way toward living a moral, engaged life, and that's why politics takes center stage here instead of religion. After all, politics is how humans decide collective morality, questions of how to live morally in a community (of whatever size) and of which values will be shared by that community. Conversely, religion dictates those answers to humans, rather than allowing them to explore and form their own morality.

Rice says he was first inspired by the lyric from Bob Dylan, song, "With God on Our Side": "I can't think for you, you'll have to decide, did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?" Rice was quoted at the time saying, "We need to humanize Christ, because for me, I find Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels as a God as a very unrealistic figure... The same is true, on the other hand, for Judas who is portrayed just as a sort of cardboard cut-out figure of evil." Strangely, the bulk of American and British critics complained repeatedly that this was not a proper retelling of the Biblical story of Christ, and the respected British director Peter Hall said, "I think Jesus Christ Superstar says nothing about Christ and nothing for or against religion." Of course, they were exactly right, but they hadn't understood that this was the creators' intention all along. Rice and Lloyd Webber never intended to tell the "Biblical" story but instead an alternative story of famous events; and what's more, they were telling the story of Judas, not Jesus.

With Superstar Rice and Lloyd Webber broke new ground in several ways. First, the idea of rock opera was still brand new; though The Who's Tommy had already been released, no rock opera had been staged. Second, the idea that rock and roll was an acceptable - even a preferable - language with which to tell this story was quite radical. And perhaps most important to us today, the choice to focus the show on Judas rather than on Jesus lifted the show out of the category of mere cultural rebellion and into the realm of legitimate intellectual and artistic endeavor. This was a show not about Jesus' teachings, his divinity, his suffering on the cross, or his resurrection; this was a story that asked a simple question: Why did Judas feel he needed to betray Jesus? As the quote above shows us, Rice delved deep into all these characters, infusing them with personality, psychology, and ideology that the more simplistic storytelling style of the Bible never offered. This show dramatized not just what happened, but why it happened. The show opened with Judas' warnings of disaster (in "Heaven on Their Minds") and ended with Judas' I-Told-You-So song, "Superstar." This is Judas' story; he is the only central character who changes, who learns, who goes on a journey. Jesus is the same at the beginning of the story as he is at the end. He can't be the protagonist.

The show's title song was released as a single before MCA recorded the whole opera