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    What You Remember About ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’

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    Listening to the album. Singing along at the show. And wearing a loincloth to play the title role. All fresh in our readers’ minds in the 50 years since.Fifty year ago, “Jesus Christ Superstar” landed on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theater, and the careers of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice and Ben Vereen would never be the same. Responding to a recent article celebrating the anniversary, nearly 400 readers shared their own memories of hearing, seeing or acting in the show, then and since. Here is an edited selection.Setting: A dinner party at our house in Toledo, Ohio. Time: Fall 1970. Dramatis Personae: My parents (Mom, probably in a Halston Ultrasuede dress, Dad with au courant sideburns) and 10 of their groovy friends. Music: The “Jesus Christ Superstar” cast album is on the stereo. What is that incredible music? Everyone thought it was the most modern, creative and innovative thing they’d ever heard. I was 8 years old. I went on to memorize the whole album and can still, to this day, pretty much sing any song. LISA W. ALPERT, New YorkI played Jesus in my Connecticut boarding school production in November 1982. Me, a Pakistani Zoroastrian with a decent baritone — yes, “Gethsemane” was near impossible. Women played Simon and Judas; a mix of the school’s nerd and jock squads Caiaphas and his cabal; and the son of a French expat aristocrat sang Pilate. As I dragged the cross to Calvary, from stage through audience to exit, my loincloth snagged on I still don’t know what, and unbeknown to me unraveled slowly as I performed trudging up that imaginary hill. I’m certain Christ flashing a healthy mop bordered on blasphemy. FRAMJI MINWALLA, Karachi, PakistanI was asked to play Herod in the 2003 tour with Carl Anderson, Sebastian Bach and Natalie Toro. Carl blew me away every night as Judas. At 58 years old — still singing, wrapping each note with deep, rich, emotional life. He was a marvel! He is missed! Natalie Toro brought an exotic beauty to her performance and should be remembered as one of the best Marys ever. And then we come to Sebastian Bach of the ’80s rock band Skid Row [as Jesus.] It was an interpretation like no other. That’s the best way to remember it! PETER KEVOIAN, Dingmans Ferry, Pa.I appeared as Pilate in a dance recital production where my first wife went to see her sister perform and saw me as well. A week later she seduced me and then her ex-husband insisted we marry. He didn’t want his kids exposed to a “sinful” relationship. So I owe that part of my life and the rest as well to “Jesus Christ Superstar”! PAUL JANES-BROWN, Pukalani, Hawaii“Jesus Christ Superstar” was my first Broadway show. I had been listening to the double album for months when the time finally came for us to go: Me, my best friend, Stacy, and her magical Aunt Joanne. Stacy’s aunt took us — two 10-year-old kids — from Long Island to Times Square. I was breathless watching the cast sing all the songs I knew by heart, and had to keep myself from singing with them. And when King Herod appeared in heels higher than any platform shoes I’d yet seen in the early 1970s, I laughed with the best of them and felt oddly at home. RUSSELL KALTSCHMIDTMy husband Stephen Altman was the assistant electrician at the Mark Hellinger. Toward the beginning of the run, he remembers that one of the Apostles was supposed to put a safety clip on Judas’s harness, when they “hang” him at the end of the show. He missed the clip, and Nicky Knox, one of the flymen, grabbed Ben Vereen and saved him! Fortunately, Ben’s neck was very strong! Stephen is a proud 53-year retired member of IATSE Local #1. DOREEN ALTMAN, Morrisville, N.C.Age 21, and I took the girl of my dreams, who to this day remains one of my favorite people, to the final preview. When Yvonne Elliman sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and reached the extremely high note, I felt, for the first time in my life, an actual physical electrical stimulation going up and down my spine. JOSEPH R. REM Jr., Hackensack, N.J.I played King Herod in a production in Auckland, New Zealand, in the late ’80s. Of course every director was trying to find a new “take” on Herod’s song. I just happened to be cast by someone who thought it would be a brilliant idea to have me pop out of a giant Easter egg which then became an ornate bath, covered in pink balloons (and only balloons), with a pink shower cap and brandishing a golden loofah. My dancing troupe were dressed like Playboy Bunnies. Well, it was the ’80s, I suppose. CHRIS BALDOCK, Canberra, Australia More

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      Why ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ the Album Has Always Rocked

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      When I discovered the record, it felt like the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.I’m here to spread the good word of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the album.It’s a little odd that a record so rapturously received, at least in the United States in the early ’70s, is now mostly left off best album lists, and didn’t secure a lasting place in the rock music canon.Then again, perhaps it was inevitable that “Superstar” the album would end up eclipsed by “Superstar” the stage show, which followed a year later. It’s natural to think of the album as an artifact of the theatrical experience, rather than as a singular artistic vision in its own right, because that’s the way it usually works. It can be tough, for new listeners, to hear the music for the theater.Maybe it’s just that no serious rock connoisseur wants to admit to digging the guys who did “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Excuse me, for a moment, if I come off as weirdly defensive about the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The night my parents met, my mother, a former singer, was performing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” onstage. She has still never seen “Evita.”Revisiting the 1970 album via the recent release of the 50th anniversary edition, I’m as excited by it as I was when I was 15 and listened to it for the first time. My high school classmates were wallowing in their teenage angst listening to Limp Bizkit and Korn — this was around the turn of the millennium — and here I was, immersed in the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.But for me, tuning into a Judas-centered retelling of the Passion of the Christ felt like a kind of rebellion too. I was obsessed with the song “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” which epitomized emo before that musical term existed, and the electric-shock scream of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, in the role of Jesus, railing at an unresponsive God. (“Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain!”) While “Superstar” isn’t overtly anti-religious, the impertinence of it gave a young, questioning Catholic a lot to think about.Like a lot of music I loved, and still love from that era, it was kind of preposterous. The “Superstar” overture alone — surely one of the most unsettling rock record openers, let alone musical overtures — features harrowing electric guitar, synth, strings, boisterous brass, and a choir dropped in from a horror movie. The whole thing is more Roger Waters than Rodgers and Hammerstein. Indeed, those musical ingredients can be heard in Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” released in the United Kingdom the same month as “Superstar.”The musical tracks for “Superstar,” Rice explained during a podcast, were laid down in a haze of marijuana smoke — at the same London studios where the Rolling Stones recorded “Sympathy for the Devil” — with each day’s session beginning with a half-hour jam session. Most of the musicians had played Woodstock behind Joe Cocker. Gillan recorded his vocals in three hours and played a gig with Deep Purple that night.It’s no wonder “Superstar” rocks.From the get-go, there’s “Heaven on Their Minds,” whose guitar riff has an evocative directness right up there with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It also has Murray Head as Judas screaming “Jesuuuus!” and sounding kind of blasphemous doing it. How often do you want to blast a showtune — the term seems inadequate here — as loudly as possible? How many classic musicals kick off with a sound and atmosphere worthy of heavy metal? (Not counting “Les Misérables,” whose opening number features the chain-gang clink of actual heavy metal.)On the other end of the spectrum is “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a moment of tuneful introspection not miles away from Carole King’s “Tapestry,” which was the second-highest-selling album of 1971 behind “Superstar.”If one thinks of “Superstar” as a concept album, it’s that rare one that tells a compelling, coherent story, more narrative driven than Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or The Who’s “Tommy,” with none of the vaporous verbiage of a lot of rock music at the time. The whole thing is built, as Lloyd Webber is fond of saying, “like a cast iron boat” — a rock radio play, or a stage show for the proscenium of the imagination. In music industry parlance, it’s all killer, no filler.Rice, the former aspiring pop star that he was, has always excelled in down-to-earth lyrics that make outsize characters thoroughly relatable. It’s partly why the lead vocal performances here hit you in the gut. When Yvonne Elliman’s Magdalene cries “He scares me so,” you believe her. When Murray Head’s Judas chokes out the same line, in his own anguished version of that song — Lloyd Webber, ever the skillful deployer of the poignant reprise — you believe him, too.When it comes to Lloyd Webber’s musical audacity, it can sometimes feel as if it’s not just rock snobs that underrate “Superstar,” but also self-professed musical theater lovers.Rice, left, and Lloyd Webber are now musical theater royalty. Yet some of their work remains underrated by musical fans.Again, it may seem strange to suggest that the composer of “The Phantom of the Opera,” sometimes considered to be one of the most successful pieces of entertainment, is underrated by musical fans. But it’s precisely because of that kind of commercial success that Lloyd Webber is taken for granted, dismissed as a populist composer of the kinds of hummable melodies that might, say, pacify a temperamental president.This is unfair to the composer who, on “Superstar,” was having his way with the kinds of time signatures that were dazzling fans of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Just listen to “The Temple,” its feverish 7/4 time signature is a nod to Prokofiev’s equally tumultuous seventh piano sonata, with nary a beat to take a breath. Even more impressive is “Everything’s Alright,” probably the catchiest tune ever written in 5/4. And I include Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” in that.That’s not to mention Lloyd Webber’s essential, monumental achievement here, of creating 90 minutes of music deftly combining orchestra, rock band and a small army of vocalists. Let’s just say that Stephen Sondheim, who happens to share a birthday with Lloyd Webber, doesn’t have a monopoly on musical complexity, psychological depth and conceptual ambition.Lloyd Webber and Rice became musical theater royalty. But before that, they were a couple of shaggy-haired youths who captured the disparate music of the era like few other musicals until “Hamilton.” There was nothing like it in 1970, and there’s not been a lot like it since. More

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      ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at 50: What Was the Buzz?

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      It was the spring of 1970, and Yvonne Elliman, an 18-year-old singer and guitarist from Hawaii, had just finished performing at a London nightclub when a breathless young man rushed the stage.“You’re my Mary Magdalene!” a wide-eyed, 22-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber announced.“I thought he meant the mother of God,” Elliman, now 69, said in a recent phone conversation, explaining that she had been unfamiliar with the biblical story. “He was like, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s not the mother, it’s the whore.’”They had a laugh, and she went on to sing the part in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the seminal rock opera by Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, for the concept album, the first arena tour, the original Broadway production and the feature film.The musical, which opened 50 years ago on Oct. 12, 1971, turned the story of one of history’s most notorious executions into a splashy spectacle. In doing so, it married rock and musical theater, ushering in Broadway’s British invasion of the 1970s and 1980s and paving the way for shows like “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”But the nearly 90-minute concept album came first in 1970, because, as Lloyd Webber recalled recently to The Telegraph, no producer wanted to put “the worst idea in history” onstage.“We never knew how it was ever going to get staged,” Lloyd Webber, 73, said in a recent phone conversation. “So it wasn’t a collection of rock tracks or something put together. It had to be read to you and you could understand — the dramatic context of the whole thing had to be the recording.”Jeff Fenholt in the Broadway production. The rock opera portrays Jesus as simply a man, who loses his temper, doubts God and gets caught up in his own celebrity.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesThough the album fizzled in England, the rock opera with a full orchestra and gospel choir took off in America, climbing to No. 1 on the Billboard charts by February 1971. A year after its release, the initial album had sold 2.5 million copies in the United States.“We were staggered by the success,” Rice, 76, the show’s lyricist, said in a video call from his home in Buckinghamshire, England. “MCA let us make a single — two unknown guys — with a huge orchestra and a rock section. And with rather a controversial title. And it worked.”A national concert tour followed in 1971, and audiences packed stadiums to hear Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Carl Anderson (Judas) and Jeff Fenholt (Jesus) belt out hits like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” “Heaven on Their Minds” and “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say).”“It was crazy,” Elliman said. “I was asked to go to a hospital and put my hands on a girl who’d been in a car accident. I didn’t know what to say — I held her hand and sat with her. But a few weeks later, her parents wrote to me that she got better immediately after me seeing her.”Broadway OpeningAndrew Lloyd Webber was 23 and Tim Rice was 26 when their show opened on Broadway on Oct. 12, 1971, at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesAt last, they got the green light: Broadway.Tom O’Horgan (“Hair”) was tapped to direct after Lloyd Webber missed a telegram from the director Hal Prince, who had expressed interest. “The one person I’d have loved to have seen do it would have been Hal Prince,” Lloyd Webber said in the interview. “Would it have turned out differently? Would it have been good? I don’t know.”The show, which narrates the last seven days of Jesus’s life through the eyes of one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street to an audience that included Lloyd Webber, 23, and Rice, 26. But in a joint interview with The New York Times later that month, both men practically disowned their director.“Let’s just say that we don’t think this production is the definitive one,” said Lloyd Webber, who in later years would call O’Horgan’s $700,000 staging a “brash and vulgar interpretation” and opening night “probably the worst night of my life.”Reviews were mixed. Dick Brukenfield of The Village Voice praised Lloyd Webber’s “energetic music” but noted that the ocular dazzle — the sets included a large special-effects “chrysalis,” a bridge of bones, and a giant set of dentures — distracted from the story. “It looks like a record that’s been reproduced onstage with visual filler by Tom O’Horgan,” he wrote.The New York Times critic Clive Barnes panned the production, writing that it “rather resembled one’s first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting, but somewhat unsurprising and of minimal artistic value.”Cries of “Blasphemy!”Opening night attracted crowds of leaflet-bearing Christian and Jewish protesters, who regarded what The New York Times writer Guy Flatley called “the strutting, mincing, twitching, grinding, souped‐up ‘Superstar’” as theatrical sacrilege.“Going into the theater it’d be ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’” said Ben Vereen, now 75, who played Judas.Lloyd Webber added: “I’m not convinced that Robert Stigwood, our producer, might not have actually orchestrated one or two of them. I think it might have had a much rougher ride today than it did then.”Rice and Lloyd Webber were accused of denying the divinity of Christ and making a hero of Judas, who is the unambiguous villain in the New Testament. Jewish leaders were alarmed that the musical made it appear as if Jews were responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion, which they feared would fan antisemitism.“We were criticized for leaving out the Resurrection,” Rice said. “But that was not part of our story because, by then, Judas was dead. And his story was over.”Conservative Christians were also startled by the sexual overtones between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who finds herself falling in love with him.“I’d get evil letters from people who said they wanted to kill Mary so Yvonne could come out again,” Elliman said.But Rice is clear: There was never an affair in the “Superstar” story line.“I would imagine he would have been a very attractive man and yet not somebody who was out looking for a girlfriend,” he said. “He was somebody who was charismatic and powerful. And, and this woman is slightly afraid of that, maybe afraid of what her own feelings are.”Jesus and JudasBen Vereen, center, played Judas. The character was inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the song “With God on Our Side.”Bettmann, via Getty ImagesJesus Christ, played by Jeff Fenholt, loses his temper, doubts God and gets a bit caught up in his own celebrity. He’s simply Jesus, the man, with all the attendant problems and failings.“He could feel pain,” Rice said. “If he was only a god, then things like a crucifixion, which is a horrible, horrible torture and death, wouldn’t really be a problem. If he’s a man, whether or not he’s a god, he has to suffer. He has to have doubts.”Those doubts are most on display in the “Gethsemane” rock scream, in which Jesus pleads — with a wailing G above high C — for God to let this cup pass from him.“We wanted to have a rock tenor who contrasted with the voice of Judas,” Lloyd Webber said.Vereen, who was cast as Judas, was nominated for a Tony Award for the role. He said the biblical account of the relationship between Jesus and Judas left him room for interpretation.“Jesus never wrote the book, and Judas never wrote the book,” he said. “All we hear is the hearsay of these men from the disciples in the Gospels.”Inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the 1964 song “With God on Our Side,” Rice set out to humanize the New Testament’s unambiguous villain.“I thought, well, ‘This is a very good character, which I can expand from what’s in the Bible, because there isn’t very much in the Bible,’” Rice said. “He was a human being. He had good points and bad points. He had strengths and weaknesses.”At first, Vereen said, he struggled to understand his character’s motivation. Then, after combing through the Bible, he came up with a theory.“Hypothetically speaking, maybe Judas really loved Jesus more than any of the other disciples and wanted him to be the hero that ruled the country,” Vereen said. “And he felt that if he betrayed him, the Israelites would rebel and put Jesus in the role.”A Musical Radio PlayYvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene. She was one of the few actors to not only perform on the concept album, but also to appear in the Broadway show and the movie.Rolls Press/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesBecause the show began as what Lloyd Webber calls a musical radio play, meant to be listened to straight through for 90 minutes without any visuals “on a turntable, in those days,” he said, he had to come up with strategies to keep the listener’s attention.“A lot of that has to do with how you plant themes and how you deal with them,” he said. “My idea for the overture was to introduce every ingredient that I could think of within the musical palette we were going to hear through the rest of the recording.”And then those themes recur, one by one, as when the whole of the overture is mirrored in the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, or when a song reappears with a twist, like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” To Mary Magdalene it’s a love song about Jesus; when it returns as a motif sung by Judas as a lament, the lyrics change: “He’s not a king, he’s just the same/As anyone I know/He scares me so.”“Judas understood Jesus, and he obviously was clearly obsessed and loved him,” Lloyd Webber said. “And then at the same time, you’ve got this woman, who was also, if you follow the Bible, clearly very, very much in love with him.”And then, of course, there’s the musical’s oddball track.Herod, Paul Ainsley’s glitter-flecked, platform-sandaled drag queen, commands the son of God to “Prove to me that you’re no fool/walk across my swimming pool” in “King Herod’s Song (Try It and See).” The bouncy ragtime number serves as comic relief after Jesus’s gut-wrenching “Gethsemane” aria.“It’s taking a conventional showbiz number and making it something really very, very nasty,” Lloyd Webber said. “When Herod turns around and says, ‘Get out of my life!,’ that’s a number that’s gone wrong.”Rice said: “Musically, I think it’s a brilliant stroke on Andrew’s part. Just as everything’s getting heavier and heavier and heavier, and suddenly you have a very catchy melody. We wanted people to almost be misled into thinking, ‘Oh, well, you know, maybe it’s going to be a happy ending.’”The Show’s LegacyWith $1.2 million in advance sales, the Broadway show sold out almost every performance for the first six weeks. But the hype quickly dimmed. It ran for 711 performances in all and failed to win a Tony Award despite five nominations, including one for best score.But the musical’s legacy has endured, spawning three Broadway revivals (in 1977, 2000 and 2012), a 2012 Lloyd Webber-produced televised competition series to cast the titular role for a British arena tour, a 2018 televised NBC production that starred John Legend as Jesus and resulted in Emmy wins for Rice and Lloyd Webber — and now the 50th anniversary American tour, interrupted by the pandemic, that resumed performances in Seattle late last month.“51 years since the album came out … blimey!” Rice said.Lloyd Webber, looking back, said, “Everything I was doing was all instinct.” He added, “Yes, I’d had some amateur productions, but we’d never had anything in the professional theater — and I don’t know whether that would have influenced us for good or bad.”He thought for a second.“Without sounding immodest” — he chuckled — “it’s actually rather good.” More