![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha and I went to watch Jesus Christ, Superstar at the 5th Avenue Theater and… well… it wasn’t that good. The problem was Judas (Miles Lavi-Jones), and Judas’s problem with the spectre that hangs over every production of JCS, ever: the soundtrack and the movie. There were other problems, but Judas, man, that was the biggie.
Unlike a lot of theater-to-film translations, the movie did a good job of presenting the story and the music without visually being a faithful translation of some theater producer’s vision. The music was catchy and successful and told a version of the story that was very palatable even to non-Christians.
So every production of JCS has to wrestle with: do we want to sound like that, or do we want to avoid sounding like that, and how do we do it in a way that communicates clearly that we’re our own thing, driven more by our appreciation of the material than we are the legacy of this thing? The 5th Avenue production was clearly telling the actors, “Do you own thing.”
Choosing Mari Nelson, a woman, to play Pilate was an interesting choice, and she rocked the role. Alexander Kilian makes a very good Jesus, and is clearly trying to embody the human character without addressing Ted Neely’s historic performance. Herod, Peter, Ciaphas were all competent.
Judas was angry. Screechy. ALmost incomprehensible. Trying so damn hard not to be the introspective Judas of the reference material, going for an inflicted, tortured, and just plain angry Judas, angry with Jesus, God, the system, he’s constantly pointing at others about how mad he is that he’s hitched his wagon to a doomed star. He was hard to understand, hard to empathize with (and you’re supposed to empathize with him).
The mic-work was sub-par for the 5th Avenue. The sets were spectacular, and the overall work did its job well. The costuming choices were, well, choices. Jesus is dressed for the movie: a 1970s guru. His followers were in vaguely 80s dance-video “streetclothes.” The secular Jerusalem residents wore 1950s upper-middle-class suits and gowns. The Jewish hierarchy wore costumes taken out of a BBC closet from 1970s Doctor Who. The Romans all wore modern clothes– including the centurions dressed as ICE agents, complete with bull-pup SMGs. “Superstar,” predictably, was performed as if recording as a Donna Summers pre-MTv video.
Choices were also made on what to emphasize through focus, detail, and, well, emphasis. The “Heal yourselves!” scene toward the end of Act I did a much better job than the film at exposing just how in over his head Jesus was when he moved his operations from Nazareth to Jerusalem, just how much bigger the problems were than they looked from what is probably a 5-day walk in the era before telecommunications or even reliable roads.
It’s a passable production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. But in its dialogue with the legacy of the play, it didn’t hold its own.
Unlike a lot of theater-to-film translations, the movie did a good job of presenting the story and the music without visually being a faithful translation of some theater producer’s vision. The music was catchy and successful and told a version of the story that was very palatable even to non-Christians.
So every production of JCS has to wrestle with: do we want to sound like that, or do we want to avoid sounding like that, and how do we do it in a way that communicates clearly that we’re our own thing, driven more by our appreciation of the material than we are the legacy of this thing? The 5th Avenue production was clearly telling the actors, “Do you own thing.”
Choosing Mari Nelson, a woman, to play Pilate was an interesting choice, and she rocked the role. Alexander Kilian makes a very good Jesus, and is clearly trying to embody the human character without addressing Ted Neely’s historic performance. Herod, Peter, Ciaphas were all competent.
Judas was angry. Screechy. ALmost incomprehensible. Trying so damn hard not to be the introspective Judas of the reference material, going for an inflicted, tortured, and just plain angry Judas, angry with Jesus, God, the system, he’s constantly pointing at others about how mad he is that he’s hitched his wagon to a doomed star. He was hard to understand, hard to empathize with (and you’re supposed to empathize with him).
The mic-work was sub-par for the 5th Avenue. The sets were spectacular, and the overall work did its job well. The costuming choices were, well, choices. Jesus is dressed for the movie: a 1970s guru. His followers were in vaguely 80s dance-video “streetclothes.” The secular Jerusalem residents wore 1950s upper-middle-class suits and gowns. The Jewish hierarchy wore costumes taken out of a BBC closet from 1970s Doctor Who. The Romans all wore modern clothes– including the centurions dressed as ICE agents, complete with bull-pup SMGs. “Superstar,” predictably, was performed as if recording as a Donna Summers pre-MTv video.
Choices were also made on what to emphasize through focus, detail, and, well, emphasis. The “Heal yourselves!” scene toward the end of Act I did a much better job than the film at exposing just how in over his head Jesus was when he moved his operations from Nazareth to Jerusalem, just how much bigger the problems were than they looked from what is probably a 5-day walk in the era before telecommunications or even reliable roads.
It’s a passable production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. But in its dialogue with the legacy of the play, it didn’t hold its own.
