Have you heard about Jesus Christ Superstar

 

 Jesus Christ Superstar staged as a live "concert" performance on NBC on Sunday night. First released as a concept album in 1970, the work by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice not only imagines a very human story behind the final days in the life of Jesus, but it focuses on that story even when it involves ugliness, vanity, and conflict. It posits that Jesus felt not only frustration, but even resentment and ambivalence not only about his faith, but about his own followers.

 

Superstar is also kind of weird, in a very specific way, and you'd lose something if you tried to make it otherwise. For one thing, the show is firmly of the '70s, and Sunday night's performance didn't try to escape that fact. Trying to go with authentic dress would make the rock songs seem weird, and trying to go too contemporary would quickly get too cute. Like a lot of other stagings, this one went for a soft, contemporary-but-not-too-specific look. As Jesus, John Legend wore a gray robe over a white shirt and pants, and as Judas, Brandon Victor Dixon

Superstar has attracted all kinds of experimentation and interpretation: on a personal note, I saw a performance in college that was partly cross-cast with a female Jesus and a King Herod played by a woman in red pajamas. It's ripe for that kind of free-associating in part because it's kind of narratively shaggy. It sets a series of tableaus, but it doesn't necessarily attempt to create a single through-line.  the presence of Jesus himself was initially quite restrained. Jesus is introduced when he already has many followers, and the nature of his fame, for lack of a better word, is the focus of the first part of the show  Musical theater at this level is hard to share with a lot of people in live settings, for economic reasons and lots of other reasons, too. Putting productions on TV doesn't precisely scratch the same itch, but the more of these they do, the more they'll learn. There's already a shift toward theater talent and theater styling

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