Show Business: The Gold Rush to Golgotha

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Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination? —Shaw

You cannot serve God and mammon.—Jesus

Vulgarity: something vulgar—for instance, seating a chimpanzee at a formal dinner. —Webster

I just like to stir people up.—Tom O'Horgan, director

DEPENDING on how one looked at them, the happenings in and around Manhattan's Mark Hellinger Theater last week would have confuted the claims of Jesus, or confirmed the dark suspicions of Oswald Spengler, who liked to think that the twilight of Western civilization will be marked not by true religion, but by an upsurge of fervid religiosity. Jesus Christ Superstar, the rock opera that is rocking Broadway's new season, is show biz with a twist: Director Tom O'Horgan, who was influenced by Olsen & Johnson, has made it into a sort of Heavenzapoppin.

Inside the theater, on boards once trod by such creations as Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, a white-robed, rock-age Jesus Christ now strides barefoot. He arrives onstage most phallically, rising like a glittering crocus out of a chalice that somewhat resembles those silvered bowls in which hotels serve grapefruit. He departs crucified on a Daliesque golden triangle that is slowly projected toward the audience by a hidden cherrypicker lift. In Jesus' company come a sweetly sensuous, cheek-kissing Mary Magdalene, a quintet of Jewish high priests who call for a "final solution" to their Jesus problem, and King Herod—a queen in full drag. There is also the traitor Judas, played by a black whose considerable talent and limitless energy sometimes upstage Jesus. Clad in silver jockey shorts, Judas returns from the dead on a butterfly-winged acrobatic bar to ask the doomed Jesus "Why you let the things you did get so out of hand?" He does not sing Swing Low, Sweet Iscariot. But, over a heavy blues-rock beat, he does sound the show's provocative theme:

He's a man—he's just a man He's not a king—he's just the same As anyone I know.

Outside the Mark Hellinger, police patrolled the sidewalk at curtain time on opening night while pickets marched in protest. Queues of buses continue to disgorge paying customers who have bought seats in blocks: suburban klatsches of all sorts, whole schoolfuls of children, and Protestant, Catholic and Jewish lay groups, many of whom have heard Jesus Christ Superstar on records at church or temple. Simultaneously, religious groups, often from the same denominations as those flocking inside, proclaim outrage at the show and lament that it does not include Jesus' Resurrection. YOU'VE GOT YOUR STORY TWISTED! JESUS is THE LORD. The American Jewish Committee soberly considered whether Jesus Christ Superstar is good or bad for the Jews and decided that it's bad. It issued a seven-page study asserting that the show's creators rival even the Passion Play of Oberammergau in blackening Jewish character and posing a threat to "Christian-Jewish relations."

Pleasure or Rage