It’s hard to pin down Jesus in the 1971 rock musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Sometimes, co-creators Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice seem to agree with Mary Magdalene, who sings “He’s a man, he’s just a man,” in the hit ballad “I Don’t Know How To Love Him.”
This is a low-key, unassuming messiah, especially as embodied in this latest Broadway revival by Paul Nolan — a lank-haired scraggly guy who can barely fill his tunic.
But then Nolan opens his mouth and whoa, here comes the superstar — a god of the rock kind, strutting about and casually dispatching falsetto thrills. This is a badass Jesus who sets the heathens straight in “The Temple” through the power of his megaphone voice. And when he shrieks “Whyyyyyyyy should I dieeeee?” in the epic “Gethsemane,” his cry shakes the mezzanine.
Like any good icon, Nolan’s Jesus exerts a pull that’s both spiritual and physical. “Mary that is good,” he sighs suggestively after everybody’s favorite hippie prostitute (Chilina Kennedy) coos “Let me try to cool down your face a bit.”
She’s not the only one who’s smitten. The governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate (a solid Tom Hewitt), stands up for Jesus, while Judas Iscariot (Jeremy Kushnier in the show I saw, subbing for an ailing Josh Young) turns from devotion to betrayal out of jealousy and frustration. You can tell he goes bad because he switches from a blue toga to an eggplant-colored velvet suit that makes him look like a sommelier at Caesar’s — the one in Vegas, not Rome.
This transition illustrates Des McAnuff’s approach. The director — whose “Jersey Boys” plays right across the street — throws a lot of stuff at the wall. Some of it hits the target, but without a strong underlying theme, the show feels like a busy patchwork of styles and references.
Robert Brill’s set is your basic snazzy warehouse with scaffolds and catwalks, as well as an LED ticker tape indicating time and locations. Costume designer Paul Tazewell went for a “Jesus Beyond Thunderdome” look, with sci-fi rasta elements for the Jewish priests. That conniving cabal is led by Marcus Nance, a Metropolitan Opera National Council winner whose bass voice resonates with silky menace.
You can hear every nuance, because McAnuff is the rare director who understands the importance of good sound design.
Appropriately, this “Jesus Christ Superstar” is performed at rock-concert volume, underlining how great Lloyd Webber and Rice’s score remains. In one cracking song after another, we tour through the early ’70s: sensitive ballads, bombastic anthems, progressive-pop numbers and glam rockers.
Hearing excellent singers deliver these tunes through powerful, crisp amplification is a primal thrill. Next time, McAnuff may even get the story right.