Jesus Christ Superstar - 2012
Apr. 10th, 2020 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealFirst of all, if you want to see this production yourself, the link is here but only for a short time, so do that first.
I should say that I come from a Christian family and am still a practicing Christian, and we are also musical nerds who see nothing blasphemous about enjoying the rock opera--we often have the album on in the days before Easter, together or separately.
However, this production misses the mark a little for me, and some of that is probably underlying issues with the album while others are this particular production. It's an internet/Occupy Wall Street era setting--the crowds hold up signs that say "Follow The 12," "Rome=Evil," etc. Herod is a Simon Cowell-type figure. There are text messages on the screen behind them with people saying things like "big day tmrw" (the march into Jerusalem, I guess), but it feels kind of inherently dated, like, that's adults trying to imitate the way The Youth speak (and that was in 2012).
Caiaphas was amusing because his vocal range is like two octaves below everyone else, heh.
Of course the original album is deliberately anachronistic and has fun with it. "If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation/Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication," but of course, we have no way of knowing. (I mean if you're of the mindset that the historical Jesus wasn't all that but Christianity happened to be in the right place at the right time to take off under Constantine, maybe a contemporary messiah would have better social media skills.)
In some sense "Gethsemane" is the climax in terms of rising action/falling action? They made it a focal point here and I think it worked.
Without going all lit snob, there's something to be said for JCS as "canon rewrite," in the sense of trying to delve more into the emotions of these figures we only get a fairly cursory glimpse of. Although I could do with a little less literal screaming at the ends of many songs. But another potential aspect of contemporary transformative works (at least in some minds) is emphasizing diversity/representation, and in this mindset I think JCS is actually not that great. Like, the "I had a dream about this Jesus guy, let's not mess with him" is actually something from the Bible! But it's Pilate's wife who says that, not Pilate himself. The conflation of Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and/or the woman who anointed Jesus' feet (the latter two are the same in some Gospels, different in others) isn't unique to this version, but it feels lazy. And in this version of "The Temple" there are lots of neon "SEX" signs. Like I get that they're trying to be all taboo and stuff, but like...is that really the best you can do?
I should say that I come from a Christian family and am still a practicing Christian, and we are also musical nerds who see nothing blasphemous about enjoying the rock opera--we often have the album on in the days before Easter, together or separately.
However, this production misses the mark a little for me, and some of that is probably underlying issues with the album while others are this particular production. It's an internet/Occupy Wall Street era setting--the crowds hold up signs that say "Follow The 12," "Rome=Evil," etc. Herod is a Simon Cowell-type figure. There are text messages on the screen behind them with people saying things like "big day tmrw" (the march into Jerusalem, I guess), but it feels kind of inherently dated, like, that's adults trying to imitate the way The Youth speak (and that was in 2012).
Caiaphas was amusing because his vocal range is like two octaves below everyone else, heh.
Of course the original album is deliberately anachronistic and has fun with it. "If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation/Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication," but of course, we have no way of knowing. (I mean if you're of the mindset that the historical Jesus wasn't all that but Christianity happened to be in the right place at the right time to take off under Constantine, maybe a contemporary messiah would have better social media skills.)
In some sense "Gethsemane" is the climax in terms of rising action/falling action? They made it a focal point here and I think it worked.
Without going all lit snob, there's something to be said for JCS as "canon rewrite," in the sense of trying to delve more into the emotions of these figures we only get a fairly cursory glimpse of. Although I could do with a little less literal screaming at the ends of many songs. But another potential aspect of contemporary transformative works (at least in some minds) is emphasizing diversity/representation, and in this mindset I think JCS is actually not that great. Like, the "I had a dream about this Jesus guy, let's not mess with him" is actually something from the Bible! But it's Pilate's wife who says that, not Pilate himself. The conflation of Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and/or the woman who anointed Jesus' feet (the latter two are the same in some Gospels, different in others) isn't unique to this version, but it feels lazy. And in this version of "The Temple" there are lots of neon "SEX" signs. Like I get that they're trying to be all taboo and stuff, but like...is that really the best you can do?
