1971 is a key year for Broadway, when two emblematic works are created, promised to a lasting success, but completely opposite in their spirit and their musical language. On April 4 opens, at the Winter Garden (where West Side Story had begun, in 1957), Follies, by Stephen Sondheim (words and music), on a libretto by James Goldman; on October 12, on the stage of the Mark Hellinger Theater, it is the turn of Jesus Christ Superstar, signed by two young Britons, Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics).
Follies is a love letter to a type of grand spectacle musical that then disappeared but that Sondheim, a great connoisseur of the styles that affected the genre, reinvented with dizzying pastiches and songs, many of which would become hits, taken up in particular by jazz singers.
Jesus Christ Superstar confirms the advent of pop-rock music on musical stages, even if it was not the first rock opera to be represented there: the way had been opened by Hair (1967), by Galt MacDermot (music), James Rado and Gerome Ragni (lyrics and libretto), an American Tribal Love-Rock Musical given in April 1968 on Broadway, where it made headlines.
A protesting tone
But Jesus Christ Superstar is part of a current (also literary and cinematographic) inspired by religious and biblical themes. The same year 1971, the young composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz presents Godspell, on a libretto by John-Michael Tebelak, while Mass (1969-1971), on which Leonard Bernstein had been working for some years, is created (with the help of Schwartz for the lyrics) in Washington for the inauguration of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
All these works have in common a protest tone and background and the use of pop-rock language, which Bernstein said at the time, during a CBS television program, “seems to be the only area where the ‘we encounter an uninhibited vitality, the pleasure of invention, the feeling of fresh air. Everything seems, by comparison, old-fashioned.”
One of the reasons for the success of Jesus Christ Superstar is that his music was known for it before the show took to Broadway. Not, as is usual with British musicals, because a London production predated the American premiere, but because Lloyd Webber and Rice first envisioned it as a studio album.
Fully sung
Murray Head, who sings the role of Judas in this piece which relates the last days of the life of Christ considered from the point of view of the renegade, first recorded a single of the song Superstar (written in 1969), in Olympic studios , in the south-west suburb of London. The luxurious budget makes it possible to bring together a symphony orchestra, a rhythm section from Joe Cocker, a gospel choir, etc.
The disc, published by MCA (Decca and RCA missed the boat by refusing the song), is an international success. Some radio stations, such as the BBC, initially refused to broadcast it and many cried blasphemy. But progressive religious institutions hail the effort to “bring Christ down from the stained glass,” as Stephen Citron recalls in Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber. The New Musical (Oxford University Press, 2001, untranslated).
A full “concept album” soon followed, which publicized more songs and convinced Robert Stigwood, producer of Hair in London in 1968, to take the show straight to Broadway. The public is surprised by its themes, its unbridled music but also by the fact that Jesus Christ Superstar is entirely sung while the musical usually alternates spoken dialogue and songs.
Luxurious distribution
Jesus Christ Superstar stays in New York for 771 performances – an honorable success, but relative when you think of those Lloyd Webber will know on Broadway: The Phantom of the Opera (1986), to mention only one of his famous works (Evita, Cats, etc.), closed its doors on April 16, after thirty-five years of continuous presence and… 13,981 performances.
Jesus Christ Superstar was shown for eight years in London (1972-1980), but, as with Hair, brought to the screen by Milos Forman in 1979, Jesus Christ Superstar reached an even wider audience through the film adaptation what Norman Jewison did in 1973.
The high-powered spectacle that Arte.tv offers was filmed in 2018 in New York, with a luxurious cast: John Legend (Jesus), Brandon Victor Dixon (Judas) and Alice Cooper as King Herod. This version, captured by twelve cameras, was broadcast live by the North American channel NBC on Easter Sunday 2018.
