Andrew Lloyd Weber

(On TV, March 2021) I was frankly surprised to like Jesus Christ Superstar as much as I did. For one thing, I’ve never been a good Sunday School student — I attended Catholic Schools because those were the only game in small Francophone Eastern-Ontario towns where I grew up, but my knowledge of the bible remains more one of rote memorization. For another thing, perhaps more importantly, I usually despise 1970s musicals: it’s a lost decade filled with depressing productions with bad music, dispiriting sequences and very little of the charm that you could find in even the most average examples of the genre in previous decades. But if Jesus Christ Superstar has a secret weapon, it’s Andrew Lloyd Weber’s rock opera music. There are some really catchy numbers here (my favourite being “What’s the Buzz?”) and this rocking take on Jesus’ last day isn’t sacrilegious as much as it’s exhilarating. I note with some amusement that religious authorities were not amused when the film was released… but fast-forward to 2021 and you’ve got a specialized religious channel playing this as an Easter week special… and padding a 106-minute film to a 180-minute time slot by cramming advertisements between every single musical number. It’s easy to see, however, why the film would be warmly accepted: it’s clearly an attempt to bring religion to the youthful audiences of the 1970s; it portrays Jesus in an uncommonly humane way; and even in its fizzy presentation, it remains reasonably faithful to the Bible. Non-religious audiences will also find more conventional cinematographic qualities to the result:  Thanks to chameleonic director Norman Jewison, its stylish presentation remains a draw even now. The framing device is a delight, Carl Anderson is quite good as Judas (to the point of sometimes challenging who’s the protagonist of the film), Yvonne Elliman is a striking beauty as Mary Magdalene and the pacing of the film is significantly more dynamic than expected, especially if your closest equivalents are films such as King of Kings or The Last Temptation of Christ — after all, even Catholic School renegades such as myself can tell you the story from A(rrest) to Z(urrection) even if Jesus Christ Superstar stops well before the truly unpleasant parts. A pleasant surprise, then — and one of the strongest musicals of the decade as far as I’m concerned.