Meet the wannabe rock star behind ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’
Fifty years on, writer tells how he and Andrew Lloyd Webber got musical into theatres
When Sir Tim Rice shows up on my Zoom screen, the last thing I expect is to be keeled over laughing.
But early on in our half-hour chat, the award-winning writer and lyricist of songs like “The Circle of Life,” “A Whole New World” and “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” makes me crack up several times.
Perhaps it’s the incongruity of hearing the venerable 79-year-old — sitting in front of a wood-panelled, well-stocked bookcase, clad in a powder blue sweater and speaking in an accent straight from TV’s “The Crown” — say things like, “I’m a rocker at heart, but unfortunately, for some unknown reason, I never became a rock star.”
That turned out to be a nice entry point for a discussion about his breakthrough show and one of the first rock musicals, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which is returning to Toronto in its acclaimed 50th-anniversary production this week. When it arrived in Toronto in December 2021, only to have its run cut short because of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, it got raves.
As “JCS” superfans know, before the stage show there was the famous double album.
Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had had modest success with an early version of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” especially at schools. They wanted to write a stage show based on the last days of Jesus Christ, but no theatre producer was interested. Thanks to the management team they acquired after “Joseph,” however, they secured a record deal with MCA.
“MCA in the U.K. was a really small label at the time,” explained Rice, “but of course they were part of the huge MCA in the States. So this small British company gave us a lot of attention because they didn’t have many artists, but we also had the full clout of the American company when it came time to promote the album over there.
“And by doing it on record, we had access to a huge orchestra, choirs and some big names. We’d never have been able to get all that if we’d done it in a theatre. And frankly, it wouldn’t have worked onstage, because in those days, rock and theatre were miles apart, and the technology didn’t exist to do a rock show in an ordinary theatre.”
The notion of a “concept album” was also just catching on.
“‘The Who’s Tommy’ had come out when we were working on ‘Superstar’ and that was a great help to us,” said Rice. “So were some other albums, like the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ Rather than think in terms of whether the album had hit singles, we liked the luxury of a double album to tell a full and interesting story. And we were helped by the trend of young people — especially in the U.S. — buying albums that didn’t necessarily have hit singles.”
Not that “Jesus Christ Superstar” lacked singles, including the title track “Superstar,” the soulful ballad “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and the showstopper “Gethsemane,” one of the most difficult songs in all of musical theatre to pull off.
While the album got limited play in the U.K., it was a huge success in the States, edging out Carole King’s “Tapestry” to become 1971’s best selling album according to Billboard.
It was so successful that more than 20 pirate live performances of the album popped up across the U.S. After shutting these illegal concerts down — the creators weren’t getting royalties — a Broadway production appeared, then a West End version, which ran for eight years. Rice preferred that U.K. version.
And now it’s half a century later. Why does Rice, one of the world’s rare EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony), think the material has endured?
“Rather than be arrogant and say it’s a good album and a good piece, I think it’s because it’s a story that everybody can relate to, whether they are pro-Jesus, anti-Jesus or indifferent to Jesus,” he said.
One of the most refreshing things about the 50th-anniversary tour is the diversity of the cast. Rice agrees, but also points out that in this respect, the show was way ahead of its time, even in the early 1970s.
“We had a black Judas from day one,” he said, referring to Broadway’s Ben Vereen and Carl Anderson. “There were also several nonwhite people in the company (including Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene). My attitude to casting is you get the best person for the part and it doesn’t matter what their background is. We’ve had one or two productions of ‘Evita’ where producers have said they couldn’t find a Latin American singer good enough to play Eva Perón. My feeling is you don’t need that. It’s called acting and the point of acting is to be someone you’re not.”
With the recent death of Torontoborn director Norman Jewison, I asked Rice about his thoughts on the 1973 film version. In his entertaining podcast “Get Onto My Cloud,” he chronicles how his ambitious screenplay for the film was rejected by the filmmakers.
“I’ve seen the film once or twice more recently and it stands up rather well,” he said. “I’m not 100-percent certain that the basic concept works. But Norman Jewison was a delightful man and really enthusiastic about the material. We exchanged some messages shortly before he died and I was very sad to see him go. I was very honoured that he made the film. I think it was underrated by me and others.”
Besides his collaborations with Lloyd Webber, Rice went on to work with everyone from Alan Menken to several pop and rock stars like Elton John, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, and Freddie Mercury. Those latter artists got him to live out his early rock star dreams.
“I’ve been very lucky with my collaborators,” he said. “For artists like Freddie and Elton, it must have been hard for them to wonder where to go after conquering the rock world. Then again, all great rockers have theatre in their blood: they’re acting different versions of themselves onstage through their songs.”
As for Lloyd Webber, Rice said the meshing of their talents and interests was a huge part of their breakthrough works like “Superstar” and “Joseph,” which finally hit the stage professionally after the former’s success.
“My interest was in pop and rock, that’s what got me into the business,” he said. “Andrew was a world expert, at 17, on musical theatre and I was an expert at 19 on rock. We didn’t set out to do it, but by working together we sort of sped up the process of bringing them together.”
‘‘ It’s a story that everybody can relate to, whether they are pro-Jesus, anti-Jesus or indifferent to Jesus.
TIM RICE
“JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR” RUNS FRIDAY TO MAY 12 AT THE CAA ED MIRVISH THEATRE, 244 VICTORIA ST. VISIT MIRVISH.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION.