Critics may snigger all they want to at Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s music, but the great songwriter Cy Coleman (“Witchcraft,” “Hey, Big Spender”) once told me, “There isn’t a Broadway composer alive who wouldn’t give his right eye to have written the first six notes to ‘Jesus Christ, Superstar.’ ”
I’ll lay you 10 to 1 those notes are going through your head this very second. Lloyd Webber came up with one of the great musical hooks of all time for the title song to his 1970 rock opera, which he wrote with lyricist Tim Rice.
You hear it, and the hairs stand up on the back of your head because you know something exciting, musically and theatrically, is about to unfold.
It was exactly 40 years ago next week that “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which began as a rock album, played its first professional performance, in Pittsburgh at the Civic Arena, before opening on Broadway in October 1971.
That production, directed by Tom O’Horgan, then a hotshot because he’d staged “Hair,” wasn’t a hit with the critics. Clive Barnes called it “less than super,” while Variety carped that it was “overproduced.”
They weren’t its only critics: Neither Lloyd Webber nor Rice cared for the production, which nevertheless ran two years at the Mark Hellinger Theatre.
Since then, “Jesus Christ Superstar” has been performed countless times around the world, including a blaring, bloated 2000 Broadway revival that lasted only a few months. Lloyd Webber and Rice weren’t crazy about that one either, I’m told.
But now, all these years later, Lloyd Webber has finally stumbled on a production that has delighted him — one that’s likely to end up on Broadway in the spring.
It’s running at Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival till October. The director is Des McAnuff, who staged the Broadway smash “Jersey Boys.”
Lloyd Webber caught the show in June, just before the Tonys, and has been raving about it ever since. He was planning to produce his own version in London next year and went to Stratford on a whim to see how the show holds up. Now he’s so enamored of McAnuff’s production that he wants it to come to New York, Stratford sources say.
Lloyd Webber could produce the show himself through his Really Useful Group, but I’m told he’d rather let some Broadway producers shoulder that responsibility. Dodger Productions, which produced “Jersey Boys” and has a longstanding relationship with McAnuff, is said to be circling. So, too, are the Mirvishes, a powerful theater family — the Shuberts of Canada.
“Lots of people are coming up to see it,” says a Stratford source. “It’s become a very hot ticket.”
The critics, who live to beat up on a Lloyd Webber show, were knocked out by this “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
The Toronto Star’s Richard Ouzounian wrote: “It’s taken 40 years, but I’ve finally experienced a production of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ that makes perfect dramatic, musical and emotional sense . . . This could be Des McAnuff’s next Broadway hit.”
The Toronto Globe and Mail called it “simply divine.”
Brent Carver, who won a Tony in 1993 in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” plays Pontius Pilate. Paul Nolan is Jesus (Nolan’s quite a hunk; this Jesus has a personal trainer), Bruce Dow plays Herod and Chilina Kennedy plays Mary Magdalene.
Given the raves — and Lloyd Webber’s ringing endorsement — this “Superstar” may rise again on Broadway.