But sitting in The Lyric, with the woman who introduced me to it (my mother), I saw a group of people my age dealing with survival in ways that my friends and I do. I’ve always been weirdly affectionate toward this script despite feeling that it was dated and occasionally dull. It’s astonishing the difference this makes. Everything from his physical movement to his emotional vulnerability is familiar. His friend Mary wishes he would engage in more self-care before his self-destructive tendencies end up killing him (spoiler alert). His friend Simon wants him to lead a violent revolution against the government that’s oppressing them. His friend Judas wants him to go back to basics before their movement gets shut down, focus on solving the social issues: help the poor, help each other, lead with kindness. It’s about an exhausted thirty-three-year-old who, after becoming a minor celebrity by giving everything he had to a doomed movement, essentially gives up. And though they were all beautiful-if you have singers who can hit these notes, it’s hard to go wrong-no production that I had seen managed to break through the generational barrier and provide social commentary on the here-and-now.Īt The Lyric, “Jesus Christ Superstar” is not about an unapproachable, perfect deity. We watched productions together in two different countries with varying levels of professionalism. As the daughter of boomers, I grew up with this musical as a context for understanding them. ![]() “Jesus Christ Superstar” was as much about the struggle of baby boomers in the seventies as “Hamilton” is about the millennial fight for survival today. There are a thousand reasons why it should not have worked then and even more why it shouldn’t work now. Nearly fifty years ago, a rock musical burst onto the scene about, of all things, the crucifixion of Jesus.
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