Who is the real star of this musical Superstar?
Barbican
For those who wonder if this show’s title might put it beyond the reach of the JC’s theatre column, it should be noted that it all started with a Jew. No, not that Jew. I refer to producer David Land who saw in the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat enough talent to give Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice a weekly wage to come up with another show.
The only proviso was to leave the Bible alone. Maybe Rice and Lloyd Webber interpreted the instruction as referring to what they might call the Old Testament. At any rate, the result was not a show but an album. Only after it became a chart hit was it first staged in 1971.
For this resurrection, Timothy Sheader’s award-winning production, first seen at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre in 2016, stays true to those album origins with a show that is much more of a gig than a musical. Robert Tripolino and Ricardo Afonso play Jesus and Judas in a display of power singing that becomes a kind of aural joust.
Tom Scutt’s set of iron girders on a construction site provides an elevated platform for the potent onstage band. And the original leap of imagination that compared Jesus’s fame to that of a pop star still holds in today’s Twitterdriven, trashier times. Though the zeal transmitted by Tripolino’s mostly mild-mannered Jesus feels more like that of a cult.
Samuel Buttery’s gold-skinned Herod appears like a decadent oneman orgy and also gets to sing to Jesus perhaps the best of Rice’s lines in the show: “prove to me that you’re no fool, walk across my swimming pool”. However, the quality of sound does little justice to Rice’s emergent lyric-writing talent. And so Jesus’s gospel and Judas’s beef with him wash over you in waves of passionately expressed but distorted zeal. As for the score, despite the album’s reputation and the respectively irresistible and undulating numbers Superstar and Hosanna, the music never made me a disciple of this show.
Still, when Afonso and Tripolino let rip there is no doubting that the potency of this work, even if the show’s creators or, indeed the writers of the original story on which it is based, may not have expected the final note struck during the press night. It was sounded not by the cast but the modern audience during the curtain call, when Judas received a more rapturous ovation than Jesus. Make of that what you will. SOLVE OUR Shabbat-friendly crossword. Writing is not required — just use your Scrabble board and tiles to spell out the answers to the cryptic clues.
HOW TO PLAY: Use the letter tiles from the game of Scrabble to spell out the answers to the clues below. Do not use the two blank tiles. Place the tiles on the Scrabble board according to the grid references given with the clues. If you successfully complete the puzzle, you will have used all 98 tiles. 8E Go on strike. (5)
10G Little whisky. (4)
11B A redskin. (5)
11M Indicate direction. (5)
12J Fight over this small bone. (4) 13D It cannot wither her. (3)
DOWN
1A Blue skies over this. (5)
2G Doubtful stories. (7)
4D It goes pop. (6)
4K A party destination. (5)
6A Illegal court. (8)
7K Stop it. (4)
8C Cheers. (5)
10C Separate the conkers. (6)
11A The beginning of a cryptic clue. (3)
11L What’s the point of this. (4) 13G A cooper. (4)
14B Adorn. (5)
14J Scene but it’s not heard. (4)