(disclaimer: I actually know nothing about the history of Broadway or its musicals. The closest I come is familiarity with the soundtracks to ‘Tommy’, ‘Les Mis’, and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which my sisters listened to for a solid 4 months while preparing to act in a 6th grade production of it. We have it on tape and it’s hilarious.)
Once upon a time, a bunch of idealistic hippies thought they could change the world with bad music and free love. They were completely wrong, of course, but artifacts of their attempt linger to this day. Facist liberalism. The hacky sack. The animatronic corpses of the remaining Grateful Dead. Despite the idiotic belief that dropping acid and shirking responsibility would revolutionize the masses, their influence spread far and wide. As with anything ‘counterculture’, what once threatened eventually lost power through common exposure. Thus it was with the hippies, and so it came that their worldview one day shone down upon America’s most banal medium, the musical.
Don’t get me wrong, I love musicals. They are of the highest artifice, with melodies mawkishly heightening emotions and people bursting into song at the slightest provocation. For the same reasons, it’s also extraordinarily hard to take them seriously. For example, if you’re looking to learn the history of Charlemagne, you do not watch “Pippin”. Enjoyment aside, the majority will agree musicals are not a fighting front in any culture war. Even though it’s about underaged sex, dropping out of school and teen pregnancy, not a single eyebrow is raised at camp-going 12-year-olds singing along to ‘Grease’(oh, how I loath those songs. Positively loath).The sugary cheesiness of its presentation glosses neatly over any controversy.
So powerful was the hippie influence though, that their ideology tainted the very form it took. Hence, the birth of the Rock Opera. Transcending mere ‘musical’, these were Spectacle unleashed, combining the dippy principles of the 60′s with the wailing guitar of the 70′s(complete with wah-wah pedal. Sweet!).
In a funny turn of events, the most staid of concepts took on a new aura within the hippie’s reign: Christianity, once the province of bible-thumping evangelicals, prim old ladies and buzz-cut pickup truck owners, was revamped into the Hippie Ideal. For really, who is Jesus but the biggest hippie of them all? With his flowing robes, fondness for sandals, and long, luxurious locks, he’d fit right in at any rally. He preached nothing but peace, love, and nonviolence, with the exception of temple-smashing(just like the hippies were smashing the system!), and lived a non-conformist lifestyle. To briefly quote Homer:
“Kids, let me tell you about another so-called “wicked” guy. He had long hair and some wild ideas. He didn’t always do what other people thought was right. And that man’s name was…I forget. But the point is..I forget that, too. Marge, you know what I’m talking about. He used to drive that blue car?”
Shunned in his own time, just like the hippies! It wasn’t so surprising then, that the early 70′s saw a glut of Christian-based rock operas: ‘Godspell’, ‘Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’, and best of them all, “Jesus Christ Superstar”.
‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ is a fairly straightforward retelling of the events leading up to Christ’s crucifixion, with some slight yet important differences. Instead of being Just Plain Evil with a capital E, Pontius Pilate and Judas are given shades of grey(fun fact: Pilate also played Bill Watson in ‘The Shining). Mary Magdalene clearly has the hots for her lord, as told in the song ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him”. The apostles are a flock of mindless sheep, and the real bad guys are the Jewish elders and the followers who turn on Jesus.
My mom caught it when it first came out, on an aborted field trip with her Catholic highschool senior class. The nuns suspected heresy from the start, but were pushed over the edge when Ted Neely(playing Jesus) showed up in a gold lamé loincloth. Before you could say ‘Jesus, Mary & Joseph’, they were hauling the girls out by their backpacks and hustling them on the bus. I was lucky enough to catch the ‘B.C. Tour’ a few years back, with Neely again playing the title role. Judas, however, sucked. For everyone else, I highly recommend the 1973 movie, which haphazardly mixes hippie tropes, Vietnam references, and your usual biblical conventions. There’s no subtlety to any part of it, but the best compendium of its mix is the temple scene, where day-glo go-go hookers writhe around amist bearded guys selling dates, purple tank-topped soldiers beat straight-up hippies with rifles, Aramains rifle through postcards, and giant-sunglassed money-changers change shekels for dollars. Then Jesus, berobed in white and trailed by apostles, busts in and wreaks havoc while singing in a piercing soprano. Yeah! Kickin’ hypocrite hippie ass for the Lord!
My favorite song is the titular ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, where for a brief moment between resigning himself to fate and crucifixion, Jesus gets a visit from his now-dead pal Judas. Firstly, Judas descends from the heavens accompanied by a babely angelic choir, strongly implying that, though he was a betrayer and did commit suicide, redemption was his. This is great because even as a kid, it always bugged me that Judas went straight to hell. Jesus knew Judas was going to betray him, and if he didn’t Jesus would never have been caught, or crucified, and would never have shed his blood four our sins. Why should Judas be punished for playing a key, if dishonorable, role in God’s master plan? He was basically the Fall Guy. Questions like this are why I wasn’t invited to continue Sunday School. Secondly, this song is removed from time and place. Judas is singing from a modern perspective, asking why Jesus didn’t choose the present to come back, as opposed to the good old stoning and smiting days. Again reflecting hippie values, he suggests His message would’ve had a far greater impact. This is doubtful to me for a number of reasons, least of which is whether the hippies would obey a guru who didn’t take money, sexual favors, or dignity from them. Judas questions Jesus’ motives, and asks him to truly reflect on who and what he is. Thirdly, the song is really catchy, and I like the dancers’ fringed gold and white jumpsuits.
As an exercise in meta, watch the movie and then catch the Mr. Show skit ‘Jeepers Creepers Superstar’, featuring Jack Black as a Gen-X slacker messiah, unwilling to actually say or do anything. It is a dead on parody complete with singing, dancing, and finding an electric socket in the middle of the desert. It perfectly makes fun of its own generation by merely replacing the hippies with themselves, and yet the hippie generation took ‘J.C. Superstar’ seriously(it grossed 8.9 million at the box office). The only difference is a change of clothes and a sheen of irony.
Someone screencapped the entire skit here; do check it out..
In a sort of bizarre twist on the spoof, a year or so later the play was revived with Sebastian Bach, former pretty boy lead singer of Skid Row.
Praise!
