Word: webber
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...Superstar reacts to Jesus quite like Judas. Indeed, to the extent that the show has any personal continuity, it is carried by the relationship between them. Lloyd Webber and Rice admit to a feeling that history and the Scriptures have been unkind to Judas. If Christ was really divine, after all, then Judas was merely the instrument of his will. And if Christ was merely a great teacher and prophet who in mid-career fell prey to delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex, then Judas ?those 30 pieces of silver aside?was merely doing what he thought...
Superstar's vulgarity is less in the realm of religion than of theatrical taste. Serious Lloyd Webber and Rice fans, in fact, may well be advised to open a new chapter in the age of McLuhan by turning down a chance at the show "because I loved the record." On LP, Jesus Christ Superstar is abstract, intimate, capable of subtly engaging the mind and the imagination. Director O'Horgan's frenetic Broadway incarnation is rarely any of those things. It is, instead, a frequently breathless and occasionally stupendous son et lumière show, crowded with mechanical contrivances, and a headlong...
...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...
With only two published works to their credit (the other is a children's musical play about Joseph in Egypt), the young team of Lloyd Webber and Rice have pushed forward the frontier possibilities of rock opera and made, just for starters, what Rice calls "a million quid" apiece ($2.4 million). They are becomingly modest about their talents, grateful for their extraordinary luck and sensibly reserved about future plans...
...Lloyd Webber, dark, slender and intense, likes to point out defensively that this is his first opera?a defense that only someone who knows Verdi's first opus can fully appreciate. Rice, tall and blond, finds inspiration in the rhyming dictionary, talks like a character out of a book by his favorite novelist, P.G. Wodehouse, and looks like somebody's kid brother home for the long hols. If fame and fortune have not yet disturbed them, it may be because so much of it has come in the U.S. "The LP record is an absolute dud in England," Rice explains...