Jesus Christ Superstar

Given that the material of Jesus Christ Superstar is barren, director Gale Edwards’ labors do nothing to ameliorate or redeem it. Edwards has said–in these columns, as it happens–that she wants to underline the text’s relevance to today. Unfortunately, her sermon on this mount has all the subtlety and originality of an evangelist’s harangue.

Possibly, in arming the cast with Uzis for a sequence where Jesus’s followers defend him from their Roman oppressors, Edwards thinks she has ripped the on-stage action from intifada headlines. She hasn’t. What she’s done is to resurrect (metaphor intended) previously employed images to make the stale–and debatable–point that, were Jesus to return today, he’d receive the same treatment he received two thousand years ago. Perhaps Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo are in her thoughts when she has the policing forces nearly kick the captured Jesus prisoner to death in s-l-o-o-o-w motion. (This Superstar is not a presentation to which parents are advised to take their children–or themselves, for that matter.) Possibly the director believes she makes a fresh and withering comment when, in the scene where Jesus ejects the money-changers from the temple, she and costumer Roger Kirk bring on men dressed in Boiler Room togs, while Edwards and set designer Peter J. Davison drop bins of TV monitors and slabs of beef down from the flies and run stock-price strips across the back walls. (As if there’s anyone connected with this production who doesn’t have money invested in that ol’ demon market.)

Amateur and professional theater historians might want to know how the current outing
compares to Tom O’Horgan’s 1971 version: unfavorably. O’Horgan’s specialty was putting a high gloss on second- and third-rate material. There are observers who maintain that, the less good the basic ingredients, the better an O’Horgan presentation was likely to be, because a top-flight script often seemed to stand between him and the vision he wanted to impose. Edwards, who cut her teeth on the likes of Shakespeare and Chekhov, comes at a play from a different angle. She pays close attention to the words–an approach that, ironically, may be her undoing here. Handed vulgarity, she grasps it firmly and reaches the finish line with something so vulgar it could be used to define that word in Webster’s next update.

So, where does this leave the cast? Aside from Maya Days, who sings the part of Mary
Magdalene with a graceful conviction, and Paul Kandel, who gives Herod a Las Vegas
brusqueness, the members of the ensemble seem to have been cast for their stamina and
their biceps–not for their acting prowess. Hard-working and industrious, they are herded around the stage by choreographer Anthony van Laast (he’s the fellow responsible for the dreadful dancing in London’s Mama Mia), who has apparently encouraged them to punch their fists in the air whenever they get the urge, to hug one another regularly, and to scowl when the religio-political climate darkens. Led by Tony Vincent as an alternately swaggering and sniveling Judas, they look like the crowd assembled for the ads Gap is now running. They’re the Jeans, and Glenn Carter–as a long-haired Jesus in an earth-toned tunic–is the lone Khaki. Poor Carter! Dealt nothing of substance to chant, he’s left to draw on whatever gestures and grimaces he can conjure to appear Christ-like. His most degrading moment occurs when, being “nailed” to the cross, he’s video-cammed with a grimace on his fake-bruised face.

And to think that outraged parties picketed Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi!