Religion has hit the big time, and is paying off. Jesus Christ Superstar has sold more than three million copies in less than a year, at prices that rose along with the record album’s popularity. And the only “official” performance of the rock opera, at the Baltimore Civic Center on July 27, charged from $4.50 to $6.50 a seat for an unstaged stage concert. In October, according to the program notes (which sold for $2), Superstar is scheduled to open at New York’s Mark Hellinger Theater.
But Superstar isn’t the only record putting religion in the top ten. Judy Collins’s “Amazing Grace,” George Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass, the Electric Prunes’s Mass in F Minor, the Webber and Rice album Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and “O Happy Day” all have helped make religion a popular, profitable theme. Besides the hit records, local radio stations are playing less well-known religious recordings. In Washington, D. C., for example, “Immortal, Invisible,” a song from The Now Faith album of the Faith United Methodist Church in Rockville, Maryland, showed up on several rock stations.
Movies and the theater are also showing a return to religious themes. More and more films are trying to explore and explain man’s spiritual nature and the restlessness he feels. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Five Easy Pieces, and M*A*S*H probe man’s spiritual confusion and question the traditional answers. (M*A*S*H, in one scene, satirizes the Last Supper.)
Jesus shows are springing up in city after city—evidence of what Variety calls a “religioso trend” in pop music and theater. In Kansas City a pirated version of Superstar was performed, with the ending changed to affirm the Resurrection. In Washington, D. C., two Jesus shows, Sweet Jesus Rock Opera and Jesus Christ—Lawd Today, opened within a week.
In a lighter, livelier vein, Broadway’s Two by Two, the musical comedy about Noah and the ark, has had good success. But the play that really is said to have brought God to Broadway is Hair. In a forthcoming book God on Broadway, published by John Knox, Jerome Ellison contends that God “is felt as a presence in the very materials of the drama.… [Hair] has brought God to Broadway as resident in bone and marrow, lip and hair, tongue and groin, circumstance and adventure. This, it seems to me, embodies the best of the theological and psychological speculation of our century. Having come this close, I question whether God will ever again return to those shadowy realms whence he has so strongly emerged to command attention on the dusty, splintered, rough-and-tumble boards of Broadway.”
From Hair and Superstar the attribution of divine immanence reached a new peak in a small, basement-like, off-Broadway theater. Godspell has put flesh on the skeleton of interest in God and given it exuberant life.
Godspell, an archaic word for Gospel, was conceived by John-Michael Tebelak, a twenty-three-year-old Episcopalian, and written by Stephen Schwartz, who is currently helping Leonard Bernstein write the text of his new Mass to open the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D. C., in September. Based on the Gospel of Matthew (though some of the parables are taken from the other Gospels), the show is a positive, enthusiastic retelling of the parables and teachings of Jesus, with the Last Supper, Crucifixion, and Resurrection included (the Resurrection is depicted by the chorus “Long Live God”). Unlike Superstar, Godspell does not question the truths of the Gospel; the cynicism and skepticism of “Herod’s Song” are absent.
Jesus, with a red heart painted on his forehead, is dressed in striped pants, a Superman shirt, and sneakers resplendent with pompons. The rest of the cast is equally striking in clown makeup (which they remove immediately before the Last Supper) and clowny rag-doll costumes. The significance of the makeup and costuming is obscure. Perhaps they are only a gimmick, an attention-getter. Or perhaps they are intended to emphasize the joyousness of the Jesus story. They do add, however, to the minstrel-like quality of the staging.
The show opens with “Tower of Babble” (not included on the record, unfortunately). Each member of the cast represents a philosopher or theologian—Martin Luther, Aquinas, da Vinci, Nietzsche (whose name was misspelled on the shirt he wore), and five others. Each sings his viewpoint; the solos become a choral fight that turns into a stage fight. And then John the Baptist enters. The way is prepared.
The players dance, pantomime, and sing their way through Jesus’ story. The parables are told with freshness and acted out in explicit, original ways. A soft-shoe, minstrel routine tells the parable of the speck and the moat. The Beatitudes are delivered through charades. The separation of the sheep and goats is particularly spirited, with the cast down on all fours bleating and baaing (one goat tries to sneek into Heaven but fails). The script is taken nearly verbatim from the King James Version, and the lyrics are surprisingly biblical and at times even evangelistic. The music ranges from soft rock to soft shoe to a honky-tonk torch song, “Turn Back, O Man,” that opens act two; the “orchestra” consists of piano, organ, bass, guitar, and drums.
As in Hair the company does not remain on stage but marches down the aisle, even climbing along the walls during one number.
The highlight of the show is the song “Day By Day,” a prayer to Jesus by his followers. They ask “to see Thee more clearly/Love Thee more dearly/Follow Thee more nearly/Day by day.” Tebelak wrote Godspell as a religious answer to despair, and this song captures the point of the play. Even more evangelistic is the song “We Beseech Thee, Hear Us,” which deals with sin, repentance, and God’s “gracious saving call/Spoken tenderly to all.”
The words are serious, but the attitude of belief is missing. The cast seemed to lack even the professional commitment of belief in the message of the show; the words are therefore unconvincing. The cast’s attitude was summed up by one member, Joanne Jonas: “The show is just great fun!” It is fun and it is entertaining, but it fails to be as serious as Tebelak intended.
In conception and spirit the show is for the young—written, acted, and sung by young people to give young people an answer to their despair. But not many young people are there to get the message; the audiences are mainly adult. The probable reason is that the kids can’t afford to come, since ticket prices range from $8 to $6. It is ironic that a show that spends a lot of time knocking materialism should be overpriced. The establishment is jumping on the Jesus bandwagon and is paying for it. Godspell might not be trying to cash in on what Jesus Christ Superstar began, but there is little doubt that it’s making lots of money.
For evangelicals who see Godspell or who buy the record (put out by Bell) or the score, the play has some exciting possibilities. The music is not as broad in scope or as ambitious as that of Superstar and takes fewer people to perform. As one reviewer stated, Godspell is “a revival meeting that the Reverend Billy Graham might put to advantage in his own exhortations.” With a cast who believed in what they were saying, the show could convey the Christian answer to twentieth-century despair. Godspell could well be one of the best ways to reach today’s kids with the Gospel and to open them up to the claims of Jesus Christ.
