John Legend, Sara Bareilles, ‘Hamilton’ veteran Brandon Victor Dixon and Alice Cooper headline NBC’s Easter Sunday special, performing the 1971 rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
The key to casting Jesus Christ Superstar, the bold-for-its-time musical retelling by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice of the last week in the life of the carpenter’s son from Nazareth, is accepting that contrary to the title, it’s all about the conflicted villain of the piece. Jesus is a figure too loaded with symbolic weight to allow for much dramatic nuance beyond introspective intensity. And alongside him, Mary Magdalene is a heartsick handmaiden. But Judas Iscariot, the outspoken apostle who sees all too clearly the dangerous threat Jesus poses to the Roman Empire and tries to warn him — taking steps that would make his name synonymous with betrayal — is the dynamic force that shapes this version of the centuries-old narrative.
So hats off to the producers for making astute choices in the breakdown of seasoned pop performers and stage actors with the dramatic chops to back up their vocal talents. While John Legend’s gentle charisma and honeyed pipes made him an affecting Jesus, and Sara Bareilles’ soulful way with a song proved a superb fit for Mary, enlisting Brandon Victor Dixon — last seen on Broadway as Aaron Burr in Hamilton — was the crucial piece of casting.
But here’s the thing: This was a phenomenally balanced production of Jesus Christ Superstar, in which star power was equaled by depth of feeling and characterization in all the principals. And the immediacy of television, with closeups capable of bringing us in tight on the performers’ faces, gave Jesus and Mary Magdalene a complexity that often is missing from conventional productions.
A slight departure from the formula established in recent years for live television musical events, Superstar was less a studio-bound traditional theatrical production than a fully staged concert as the title suggests, performed at the cavernous Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Pulsing with kinetic energy right from the overture, the show was a thrilling hybrid of Broadway and arena spectacle, taking the material back to its roots, and you could feel the excitement in the live audience even at home.
NBC gave the show a breathless promotional push, blitzing viewers with teaser trailers and clips that underlined the modernity and relatability of this Messiah-as-man account. A special 70th birthday tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber also aired, basically an hour-long infomercial for the Sunday broadcast rendered fairly insufferable by Glenn Close and Lin-Manuel Miranda throwing fawning softball questions at an interview subject who appears to require no help massaging his own ego.
But Lord Luvvy Lloyd Webber’s absence of humility aside, the sung-through show has withstood the test of time remarkably well. Released as a concept album in 1970, it was scaled up for Broadway the following year and has pretty much been playing on tour or in revivals at least somewhere on the planet ever since. Norman Jewison’s 1973 film version framed the material as a countercultural theater troupe arriving by bus in a Middle Eastern desert to perform the musical Passion Play. And while very much of its time, the movie is still a guilty pleasure, despite Ted Neeley’s Jesus being as wooden as the cross he’s nailed on. In any case, I’d much sooner take that…
