Greendale’s ‘Superstar’ grasps today’s temptations
Show retains its power, presence
Now nearing the end of its fifth decade, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” can sometimes sound like a dated relic from a groovy age, even to those among us who know every lyric and are old enough to have spent countless hours with the original vinyl version.
So why does it retain its power, presence and popularity — allowing an actor like Ryan Charles to be playing the Nazarene for the sixth time in the just-opened Greendale Community Theatre production of this cult classic?
As director Leda Hoffmann rightly intuits, part of the answer — above and beyond some of this show’s classic ballads — involves its ohso-2017 understanding of the relationship among celebrity, the cult of personality, demagogy and mob psychology.
Put another way: How do the words and teachings of someone like Jesus — or Jesus himself — manage to avoid becoming an entertainment spectacle? How does Jesus Christ avoid being drowned out by “Jesus Christ Superstar”?
Abetted by Ryan Barry’s lurid lighting, Jess Liebherr’s grunge-inflected costumes and Angela Frederick’s choreography, Hoffmann underscores such questions by frequently presenting the crowd milling around Jesus as a writhing, individually indistinguishable mass of zombies straight from Bosch’s vision of hell.
When those bodies crowd upon him clamoring to be healed, creeping downstage where he stands vulnerable and alone, one fully grasps why Jesus began “inspired” only to end up “sad and tired.” No wonder Jesus’ three-year mission to save the world now feels like a 90-year slog. Or why he feels that nobody hears a thing he says.
At Thursday’s opening performance, one sometimes really couldn’t hear what Charles said, thanks to a balky sound system that cut his and others’ mics, while also occasionally feeding them static. Balance issues with the pit, which itself sounded tentative, didn’t help.
When one could hear what was being sung, most cast members acquitted themselves well; in a through-sung show making heavy vocal demands, that’s important. At the extremes, Ernest Bell
struggled with the highest notes as Judas; Greg Doersching struggled with the lowest notes as Caiaphas.
Almost everyone — Charles included — struggled to translate what was sung into compelling acting rather than stylized mugging; Bell’s Judas was particularly unpersuasive in conveying the anguish this character feels.
There were exceptions. Shawn Holmes nailed his moment in the sun as Simon Zealotes. David Gaeth captured Pilate’s combination of brutality and fear. Marcee Doherty-Elst offered campy, vaudevillian fun as Herod.
Best in show was Carrie Gray’s beautifully sung rendition of Mary Magdalene, embodied here as chastened, older and therefore willing to listen. Gray’s Mary does so even when she sings, with the unaffected simplicity of someone learning to heed the language of her heart — and thereby open herself to Jesus’ love.