NBC’s live production of the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar on Easter Sunday was a fairly daring undertaking, in that hundreds of things (at a minimum) could have gone wrong, and only about a dozen did. Never mind that this isn’t the production I would have staged, or that its partisans (or fans of the individual singers involved) are already wildly overpraising it as “OMG the best thing EVER!!!!” It was a very solid, and very credible effort that took the source material (both the musical and the underlying Biblical story of Christ’s last few days) seriously.
The overall production design made no attempt at mimetic realism, depicting a open performance space surrounded by visible stage scaffolding with the audience on two sides, visible costumed musicians who wove their way in and out of the action, a graffitied wall backdrop, and cameras that looped in and out for closeups in the middle of the action (and so carefully choreographed they never appeared on screen).
Things that work:
There are two images that fully tap into the lasting power of the underlying story. One, where the sick overwhelm Jesus in the Temple:
That’s an apt visual metaphor: a broken world, desperate for Christ’s salvation.
So too does the final message of a crucified Christ ascending into heaven through a cross-shaped opening in the rear backdrop, backlit by light, make you willing to forgive the previous excesses in staging:
These impressions are proving not so brief. Possibly more later.
But they staged a credible production of a very difficult musical, and for that they deserve a lot of credit.