As as kid (when I adored it – and whoever above said Godspell… oh, please!) – I used to argue for some reason that it wasn’t anti-Christian. But even then I took the point of it to be to humanise the whole thing, to say ‘here are the human beings behind the myth’ (and aren’t they very like people today), which, by demythologising it, seems to me implicitly to be debunking the religion.

The title obviously implies it’s about something to do with fame. Not sure I ever really got what.

That’s very similar to my experience of the record growing up. In fact, my first introduction to JCS came from the teacher who played it for us in Sunday School. I was probably in Middle School before I was even aware that some people regarded the JCS as anti-religious.

When I was in first grade we used to sing:
“Jesus Christ, superstar! Who in the hell do you think you are?”

I presume that Webber knew more about Bach than I did, and that the similarities in musical form (superficial though they may be) between JCS and the St. Matthew’s Passion are not just coincidence.

Needless to say, neither I nor anyone else where I grew up knew anything about Bach or Handel when the album first came out, so it was widely regarded in our parts as completely sacrilegious because (1) rock music, (2) omitting = ignoring = denying the resurrection, and (3) making Judas the co-star, if not indeed the real star (and I didn’t know anything about Milton at the time, either).

In short, unconventional, therefore sinful. IIRC, when the touring company came to town in 1971, there was even a short-term bomb scare, but the show went on after a little while, anyway.

I was and am still a fan of the original album, but never the movie or the stage shows.

Simply having some guy show up and say “hey, Jesus isn’t dead, he’s Risen!” … well, it’s interesting to speculate on the fate of Christianity had there been no other gospels. No wonder later scribes felt the imperative to play Choose Your Own Ending.

Calling it ‘un-Christian’ is like calling The Satanic Verses un-Muslim: a bit pointless. Both works meditate beautifully within their chosen religious mythologies, and readily admit that they’re just that – mythical. But both works recognise the possibility of transformation that such mythologies offer. JCS isn’t just Judas’s story – of course not, Jesus spends as much time center stage as he does and his monologue in Gethsemane represents the play’s major moral crisis – and the teachings of Jesus are cherrypicked neatly to ground him in his (abstracted) cultural moment and his institution. So I would say the play does Christians a service by humanizing the mythical figures at the center of their beliefs about the world, and serves non-Christians by cutting away a thicket of goofy theology and asking questions about humans’ capacity for belief, and through it, good works.

It’s possible to venerate Jesus without believing he’s the son of God, and there’s nothing in JCS to preclude the possibility that he’s a person of strong and worthy morals that happen to spring from dementia. I don’t see that message as undercutting the faith, only complicating the myths. But thoughtful Christians have been dealing with such complications for a long time anyhow.

I quite like Murray Head (his brother’s no slouch either), but he’s destroyed by the film Judas; his voice better suits the creepy Bobby Fischer fella in Chess, another Rice concept album of note.

“No, no, we only ordered five loaves and two fishes…”

Shouldn’t there be a SPOILER warning?

Ahem.

I totally agree with derrida derider: Lloyd-Webber’s extravaganzas seem to manage one memorable song per.

You mean, like the Gospel of Mark?