MORE THAN FIVE decades ago, two young Brits with dreams of writing musicals came up with the audacious idea of a rock opera about the Passion of Jesus Christ, told from the point of view of Jesus’ betrayer, Judas Iscariot. From the very moment composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and songwriter Tim Rice proposed it, Jesus Christ Superstar provoked both adulation and condemnation. And five decades have done nothing to diminish either the show’s fire or the intensity of audience reactions.

In August, the Hollywood Bowl will host the musical with another innovative twist: Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo plays Jesus and rock star Adam Lambert takes on Judas, in a one-weekend-only production directed by Tony and Emmy Award winner Sergio Trujillo. Some have already condemned the production for giving a queer Black woman the role of Jesus, decrying it as “intentionally blasphemous” — a complaint that has been made about various aspects of the show (including its casting) from the beginning. But the show’s actual history reveals that Superstar has been anything but a blight upon Christianity. Generations of artists have found within it fertile ground to reflect on faith and justice, sacrifice and society.

‘What a terrible idea!’

THE STORY OF Jesus Christ Superstar begins with a different Bible story. A few years after Webber and Rice started working together in the mid-1960s, they were asked by the headmaster of an Anglican school to write, as Ellis Nassour explains in his book Jesus Christ Superstar: Behind the Scenes of the Worldwide Musical Phenomenon, “a brief cantata” for the boys’ choir to sing at the end-of-term concert.

While Rice was not initially keen, Webber won him over with the Genesis story of Joseph, the son of Jacob sold into slavery by his jealous brothers but then responsible for their salvation. On March 1, 1968, Webber and Rice led the schoolchildren in a 22-minute performance. With tunes whose styles included Medieval and Renaissance melodies, pop, calypso, country, and a contagious sense of humor, Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat was unlike anything that had been heard in that school or anywhere. Word of it created such a sensation in London that it was performed again, then recorded. Imagine your kids’ Christmas pageant being so good it becomes a bestselling pop album. This was the world Webber and Rice suddenly found themselves in. Rice was 24, Webber just 20.

As you might expect, religious people immediately had other ideas for them. A priest suggested Webber do a life of Christ. “What a terrible idea!” Webber reportedly said.

But Rice couldn’t shake a question from Bob Dylan’s 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’: “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” In his memoir Oh, What a Circus, Rice writes, “From a very young age I had wondered what I might have done in the situations in which Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot found themselves. ... Surely Judas was acting quite reasonably in seeing his contemporary and leader as nothing more than a man?” He proposed they tell the story of Jesus’ death from Judas’ point of view.

“Unsurprisingly,” Webber writes in his memoir Unmasked, “nobody else thought this was remotely a subject for a stage musical.” Nevertheless, the two wrote a song that put the questions Rice had about Jesus in a form imbued with Webber’s inventiveness. The song “Superstar” included blues, soul, a gospel choir, a symphony orchestra, and the conceit of Jesus as a pop star. As with Joseph, no one had ever heard anything like it. Some wish they hadn’t: Hearing on TV that the song was from a forthcoming concept album called Jesus Christ, furious Brits flooded the network’s phones. MCA Records would suggest calling the album Jesus Christ Superstar instead, to make it clear that Rice and Webber were not proposing their show as the definitive take on Jesus.

But the song proved to be a hit in the United States and Europe in 1970, paving the way for a full concept album, which would quickly soar to the top of record charts. Radio stations in the U.S. played the two-record set without interruption. Some Christians condemned it for asking questions about Jesus’ identity and relationship with Mary Magdalene, for making Judas relatable, and for ending without a resurrection. But others preached about it from the pulpit, used it in their schools, and even began to present it in concert in church. Touring companies became such a phenomenon that Webber and Rice’s manager Robert Stigwood ended up organizing official tours before the Broadway show had been produced.

The Backlash

WHERE WHITE BRITISH actor Murray Head had originated the role of Judas for the single and concept album, Black Virginian Carl E. Anderson was hired for the U.S. tour (and would play Judas in the 1973 film). The Broadway show likewise cast Ben Vereen as Judas opposite Jeff Fenholt and later Ted Neeley as Jesus. On opening night, the street outside the theater was a veritable carnival of celebrities, hawkers selling religious trinkets, and protesters, including Black people who believed the show was attributing the death of Jesus to a Black man.

From its inception, Superstar also had executives worried about its possible reception by the Jewish community. From Christianity’s earliest days, references to “the Jews” in the passion stories have been used to justify extreme prejudice and violence against Jewish people. Upon pitching the idea of the show, Webber remembers their then-manager being initially baffled. “How do I explain this at the Marble Arch Synagogue?” he wondered.

The Broadway show, which opened in October 1971, did generate criticism. The American Jewish Committee said, “the Jewish people have been maligned,” a claim Stigwood, Rice, and Webber vigorously opposed. In fact, Webber and Rice’s version of the Passion includes some high priests only wanting Jesus arrested, and Caiaphas insisting on Jesus’ death, not out of spite but fear that Jesus’ ever-expanding following and its messianic claims would bring the violence of Rome down upon the Jewish people. (Many productions of the show dressed the high priests in costumes that bore no connection to Judaism.)

The backlash returned two years later with the release of the 1973 film. Directed by Norman Jewison, the movie version imagined Superstar as a show put on by a bus full of playful hippies. Yvonne Elliman, who had been with Superstar since the album, Anderson from the tour, and Neeley from the Broadway show each delivered deeply nuanced performances. Where some Christians had complained at the idea that Mary and Jesus might be in a sexual relationship, Anderson’s Judas and Neeley’s Jesus are the clear love story of the film, the only two who actually understand what is going on and are devastated by it. Elliman’s Mary Magdalene comforts Jesus with lines such as “try not to get worried” from “Everything’s Alright.” Her triumph though was when she took what had become the overdone pop song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and transformed it into the complex struggle of a woman who has seen so much of the world and its horrible men that she’s unsure what to do with one who isn’t trying to use her.

Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, criticized the film both for its Black Judas and its portrayal of the Jewish people: Knowing it would likely draw “large numbers of impressionable young people,” he expressed the still-too-relevant fear that Superstar might “feed into the kind of disparagement of Jews and Judaism which has always nurtured anti-Jewish prejudice and bigotry.”

Meanwhile, Pope Paul VI told Jewison he thought the film would bring new believers to Christianity. And Superstar would go on to become the highest-grossing movie musical of the year and the 11th-highest-grossing film.

A wild, audacious spectacle

BY FAR, THE biggest conversation around the opening of Broadway’s Superstar, was the wildly inventive spectacle created by director Tom O’Horgan and his team. Having been initially considered and passed over as director, O’Horgan — who had made his name doing experimental theater in Greenwich Village — demanded complete creative control when approached again, effectively shutting out its creators. His approach immediately horrified Webber. It “had the vision and subtlety of Caesars Palace,” Webber wrote.

In truth, O’Horgan came to the rehearsal process with strange ideas about the material, according to Nassour. After attending a documentary about the brutality of insects and hypothesizing that they and humanity were locked in a war over the planet, O’Horgan said to set designer Robin Wagner, “What about this as our concept? Insects as a super race who take over the world and decide to put on the passion play.”

As ridiculous as “insect apocalypse passion play” sounds, it did free O’Horgan, Wagner, and the rest of the creative team to experiment radically. Jesus first emerges in Act One atop a massive chalice, dressed in a 15-foot white cape with beads that sparkled like disco balls. A later transfiguration sequence has him wrapped in an enormous gold lamé chrysalis which slowly opens into wings while Jesus transforms within. At his crucifixion, Jesus emerges on a floating cross through a massive image of God’s eye.

Certainly not everything worked for everyone. Seeing Judas sing “Superstar” in a silver speedo, and Herod doing his crowd-pleasing number in drag, “We both burst into tears,” Webber says of himself and his wife. But no one could say O’Horgan hadn’t attempted to match the audacity of Webber and Rice’s music. And the show would run for almost two years on Broadway, and eight in London, holding the record for longest-running West End production until overtaken by Cats in 1989.

After it opened, Stigwood made the unusual choice of immediately setting up other productions, allowing artists around the world to create their own visions of Superstar rather than having to re-present Broadway’s version. In the book The Designs of Jules Fisher, the show’s lighting designer recalls some such productions. The set at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles included a half-buried 12-foot head downstage center, sculpted hands so large 10 people could sit in them, and a 30-foot cross covered in cloth until it was revealed at the very end. The Paris show ended with the crucified Jesus surrounded by images of the saints. Red lasers marked the wounds on his hands and feet, “which made everyone crazy,” said Fisher. “There must have been 25 or 30 people running down the aisles toward the stage yelling ‘Merdre! Merdre!’ and throwing their programs at the cross.” In Buenos Aires, Superstar never even made it to performance, after masked gunmen threatened the cast and set fire to the theater.

Something happening now

OVER THE YEARS, Superstar has had many revivals. Neeley and Anderson toured together in versions of the show intermittently for decades and led the longest running revival in North American theater history. The show has also been back to Broadway three times, though never yet with the success of the original. In 2000, Tony Vincent gave his Judas a Billy Idol vibe with bleached hair and white sleeveless shirt under a black leather jacket, while Glenn Carter’s Jesus looks straight out of Jesus of Nazareth. Much of the passion sequence had the feeling of an aridly reverential retelling.

But the 2000 show had a standout moment in the song “Superstar,” where the now-dead Judas returns to deliver a full-cast rock performance questioning Jesus. Each production creates its own take on what is actually happening in this scene — whether Judas is actually present or a fantasy in Jesus’ head as he approaches death; whether he’s a willing participant in Jesus’ torment or not. As is the standard, Vincent performed most of “Superstar” as a rock star in concert, with little interest in Jesus’ plight. At times he even stepped on the cross Jesus is carrying, causing him to fall. But whenever the song turned to its choral refrain, Vincent’s Judas would reach for Carter’s Jesus, as though in those fleeting moments he had some measure of freedom and longed to save (or be saved by) his friend.

In the 2010s, a British production proposed to bring the show back to its rock opera roots with an arena tour. In keeping with the show’s Jesus-as-Pop Star premise, the role was cast via a reality TV competition. Over the course of two weeks and 12 episodes, Superstar crowned 31-year-old singer/songwriter Ben Foster, who soon after went on tour accompanied by Australian actor/composer Tim Minchin as Judas and Spice Girl Melanie C as Mary Magdalene. With a relatively simple set consisting mostly of a huge set of stairs and a back wall of TV screens, the show highlighted Webber and Rice’s thrilling hard rock sound. At the end of “The Last Supper,” Minchin screamed “Why?” in a style that married the metal of the score to Judas’ grief-shredded emotions, something only an arena environment could create. Webber was ecstatic. The show was finally, he said, “where I hoped it would  always be.”

In 2018, NBC presented Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert on Easter Sunday, with pop icons John Legend as Jesus, Sara Bareilles as Mary Magdalene, Alice Cooper as Herod, and Broadway stars Brandon Victor Dixon as Judas and Norm Lewis as Caiaphas. Where the arena environment allowed for a uniquely operatic sense of scale, David Leveaux and Alex Rudzinski’s direction of the live concert instead created a thrilling sense of immediacy. We weren’t transported back to the world of Jesus. Instead, the live feed gave the sense of something happening now and nearby.

Hollywood on their minds 

THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL is a challenging environment in which to do a musical. The size and shape of its open-air amphitheater make it hard to have either the visual impact you can produce on a stage or the power of an arena. Still, Trujillo’s current Broadway show Real Women Have Curves boasts some of the best set and video design currently on the Great White Way. And Hollywood as a backdrop for a pop icon-inspired take on Jesus, with the wickedly talented Erivo as Jesus, seems tailor-made for Superstar.

Talking to Billboard earlier this summer, Erivo chuckled at complaints about her casting. “Why not?” she wondered. And indeed, what has made Jesus Christ Superstar so enduring is precisely its insistence on finding fresh ways into its story. Rice would regularly respond to Christian condemnations by saying the show “is just asking questions.” Questions are ways of exploration and experimentation, our means to discovery. Just as in Superstar’s boldly innovative music and storyline, the choice of who plays Jesus and the rest are opportunities not to “get it right,” but to allow something new to be revealed.