Jesus Christ Superstar review – innovative, emotional revival is divinely inspired

The Guardian

9 hours ago

A quirk of the diary has seen revivals of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber's two 1970s super-musicals – Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar – open in England within three days. Seen together, they are remarkably similar in structure. An anguished narrator – Judas in 33 AD; Che in the mid-20th century – provokes and rebukes a protagonist to whom sanctity is attributed – Jesus; Eva – and who threatens the political classes with a revolution. Paul Hart's staging for his innovative riverside venue in Berkshire benefits – as does Jamie Lloyd's London Palladium Evita – from the current rise of political and religious populism, giving shows either side of 50 years old a strikingly topical context.
Hart uses seventeen actor-musicians, strumming or blowing between lines, with only the title character not playing an instrument, making Jesus look like a vocalist with a massive backing band. But the power of the production is how the cast devastatingly excavate the emotion in the lyrics. Clearly knowing from the outset that he must die – and that his human incarnation makes him sometimes dread and fear this – Michael Kholwadia's Jesus, unlike the serene hippy-magician in some productions, embodies the 'haunting, hunted' look described by Christian Edwards' Pilate, whose 'Pilate's Dream' is also sung in a tone closer to nightmare.
This emphasis on the horror that Christ's mission and passion would have caused to those around him extends to Parisa Shahmir's tinglingly sung Mary Magdalene. By unusually stressing the line 'He scares me so' in I Don't Know How To Love Him, she makes exceptional sense of the later reboot plea, Could We Start Again, Please?
Conversely, the Judas of Max Alexander-Taylor, displaying an extraordinary harmonic range, is more complex than the simple Biblical baddie. He truly believes that he is doing the right and nation-saving thing, as zealots everywhere will.
With stage managers watching the sky as beadily as cricket umpires, the second half starts, if weather allows, outside in the Watermill grounds. The advantage is that the Gethsemane sequence takes place in an actual garden, but the inevitable delay in getting the audience back to their seats for the trial and crucifixion means that a show of otherwise exemplary pace briefly stalls.
Lloyd-Webber still attracts much snideness but recent revivals of his Sunset Boulevard (with Don Black and Christopher Hampton) and now this twice-Rice mini-festival with Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar, leave me happy to say that he is a great musical drama composer, tackling unlikely dark material in scores that perfectly serve both the tragic and comic notes of his librettists.
At the Watermill theatre, Newbury, until 21 September