The Greatest Story Ever Sold

On the 80-ft. movie screen, a bare-backed Jesus was being flogged, each crack of the whip booming like an earthquake from a sound system clearly meant to emulate its subject and raise the dead. On the 72-ft. by 52-ft. stage in front of the film, 12 barefoot Apostles in russet rags were running away from a dwarf wielding a big, white feather and Roman soldiers dressed like Darth Vader. Across the arena, in a distracting reminder of secularity, a vast glowing sign touted the spirituous appeal of Bud Light. At the audience's feet lay crumbs from loaves passed, in keeping with the biblical parable, by dewy- eyed cast members. "Share," they intoned as they pulled the bread from inside costumes in which they had run, jumped and sweated for an hour. Thus at the Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts, opened the greatest story ever sold, a seven-month arena tour of a pageant from Paris titled Jesus Was His Name.

If neither the subtlest nor the most sophisticated, this is likely to be the biggest theatrical event of the year. After playing to more than 600,000 people in 1991 and 1992, it is projected to reach up to a million in 31 cities in the U.S. and Mexico, in such venues as Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum this week and Milwaukee's Mecca next week. Sales have been slowish, although the opening-night audience offered a standing ovation and sustained applause.

The show has the quasi-official cooperation of the Roman Catholic Church: the English text is by Monsignor Michael Wrenn, special consultant for religious education to John Cardinal O'Connor. But it is also being marketed to Protestant denominations. To cover all bases, the program includes a statement from the Anti-Defamation League noting the history of anti-Semitism in passion plays and saluting the "message of tolerance" conveyed by the tour's U.S. packager, Radio City Music Hall Productions. The 58-member cast includes several agnostics and Muslims, according to Jean Marie Lamour, 29, who plays Christ. But, he adds, "during the show, they are all believers."

Lamour's English is heavily accented, and others in the cast can barely function in English. That doesn't matter: even in the French version, the actors do not speak. They just pantomime and lip-synch to a portentous voice- over narration that calls to mind Alexander Scourby somberly narrating some war documentary. This technique enabled the show to be imported intact, and will permit performances in Spanish in Mexico City and seven U.S. cities with large Hispanic populations.

The text is sometimes magisterially suited to the operatic background music. But it is often cumbersome. (Sample: "From that day onward, they set about plotting to do away with him. On his part, Jesus refrained from coming and going freely among the people.") When Jesus preaches, the audience hears an inert medley of greatest hits -- aphorisms strung together without logic or sequence.

It might not be any better if Lamour spoke. He is more wooden than the Cross. He seems to have been cast because his expressionless features have the same effect Garbo's masklike face did at the end of Queen Christina; audiences saw complex emotions playing across her features while she was thinking, she said, of "nothing at all." This show is unlikely to lure back the lapsed, let alone convert the condemned. The faithful can impose their own meaning on Lamour's blank canvas.