Word: horgan
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...toes have been broken, but the cast has already asked for extra danger pay. Fortunately they are young (average age 21) and fleet of foot, as well as accustomed to the fast pace that O'Morgan likes and that they had to follow in putting the show together. O'Horgan took over at a moment of crisis in August, and eventually had to cast Superstar's 40 parts in a two-week marathon session. The smell of burning pot and ambition filled the theater, as some 500 candidates, more than a hundred each for the major roles, tried...
...little like the old New York Yankees summoning up 20-game winners from the farm system. Various Hair troupes produced Superstar's Judas and Jesus. A Superstar concert tour and the LP provided Mary Magdalene and Pilate. "There's a special kind of singer needed for rock opera," O'Horgan explains. "It's much more gut, more street. We have vocal ranges in this show that no one could produce without a mike, not even Birgit Nilsson...
...reason that O'Horgan's staging is a marathon exercise is that Lloyd Webber's music never stops?a rarity for Broadway musicals. The musical score has been criticized for being something less, or more, than rock. It is, in fact, an elegant pastiche, swiftly paced and highly styled, that does not sound like show music but has something for everybody: a curtain-raising blues number to loosen up the audience, a winsome torch song sung to the sleeping Jesus by an awed Mary Magdalene, and a campy Charleston-like piece that allows King Herod, outrageously turned...
...Christ was the Son of God or a man?a concern, however brief, that must be more elevating than wondering whether Lauren Bacall will lose her boy friend. There is also the consolation, not inconsiderable these days, that things might easily have been worse. For a while Tom O'Horgan was toying with the idea of a "vinyl-clad, hip Christ crucified on the handle bars of a Harley-Davidson...
THEATRICAL tricks are the trademark of Tom O'Horgan, the Superstar director. He turned Futz, nominally a modest little play about bestiality, into a Dionysian celebration with actors writhing all over the stage in transports of pagan ecstasy. In Hair O'Horgan set a similar kind of group grope to a rock upbeat. In Lenny, a crowd of gigantic papier-mâché figures symbolizing his fantasies loom over the doomed comic Lenny Bruce. In Jesus Christ Superstar, O'Horgan has characters descend grandly from on high?now in a huge mysterious whalebone basket, now on a platform designed like...