jesus – New Zealand Arts Review

Reviewed by Malcolm Calder

Luke Street at Gethsemane
Photo Zeus Martinez

Jesus Christ Superstar

Lyrics by Tim Rice, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

GMG Productions, Crossroads Live and Worklight Productions

Director Timothy Sheader

Set and Costume Design Tom Scutt

Choreography Drew McOnie

Music Director Hugh Hayden-Brown

Asst Choreography Courtney Arango

Assoc Director Alli Coyne

Sound Design Nick Lidster

Music Supervision Tom Deering

Lighting Design Lee Curran

With (Principals) Luke Street, Javon King, Hannah Richardson, Ethan Hardy Benson, Grant Hodges, Kodiak Thompson, Thomas McFerran, Eric W Scheeck, Will Silver

(Ensemble) Joshua Bess, Ashley Chafer, Filippo Coffano, Kalei Cotecson, Joshua Dormor, Savannah Fisher, Elizabeth Fullalove, Icis Hammond, Dominick Hubbard, Jake MacPhee, Thoman McFerran. Jessica Meegan, Caroline Perry, Sandy Redd, Henry Rollo, Erich W Schleck, Will Silver, Jordan Michael Todd

Civic Theatre, Auckland

Booking to 15 November

St James Theatre, Wellington, 18-21 November

Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch, 2-6 December

Familiarity Breeds Endearment

Someone once argued that being both familiar and comfortable can induce conflict so they counter each other out.

They were wrong. This Jesus Christ Superstar is both. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t editorialise. And its basic premise isn’t even debatable. It simply entertains.

As such its very familiarity brings only a very welcome endearment.

Jesus Christ Superstar tells a story about a man and the legend that has shaped civilisations for more than two millenia – whether myth or not. And that’s what good productions are all about – telling a simple story (in this case a fairly well-known one), telling it well and leaving its audiences with happy, satisfied smiles on their faces. It succeeds.

This cast is rather well-credentialled, is drawn from many different parts of the globe, some going right back to this production’s birthplace at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London a few years ago now.

Rather than Jesus, JCS, presents Judas as the fulcrum. NYC and Melbourne based Javon King gives us a Judas of loyalty, happiness, greed, conviction and then ultimately confusion and even regret before his own death. He has light. He has shade. And, as an anti-hero, he shows us an awful lot in between.

He shares influence over Jesus with what I felt was a slightly under-played Mary Magdalene (London-based Hannah Richardson) although her carefully nuanced ‘I don’t Know how to Love Him’ was well-received.

Offsetting them is the humble, confused and, at times, angry central figure of Jesus (fellow-Londoner Luke Street). While Street has played Judas in other iterations, it wasn’t until Jesus’ big song (‘Gethsemane’ in Act 2) that I found him more convincing. So did this audience.

Supporting roles were everywhere. Standouts for me included the Annas-Caiaphus duo and their Pharisees as well as the brief appearance of the deliciously faux-cabaret Pilate. Don’t ask me why, but I found his idiotic and nonchalant antics to somehow echo a certain orange-haired contemporary American politician.

Above all though, it was a joy to see such a well-rehearsed cast laden with slick professionalism eliciting a wide range of emotional responses not to mention a final scene though it would be unfair to detail here.

The set is brilliantly conceived, the costumes fit the purpose and some of the choreography memorably outstanding. However, this IS a gritty rock concert rather than a vaudeville-inspired glammed-up musical and the band, cunningly buried in various parts of an industrial-quality set show it to be just that. An Australian colleague mentioned to me that some audiences across the ditch found this production unduly loud. Not so me ! This IS a rock-musical after all – the hand-held mics tell us that! Yet the strong baseline only managed to kick me in the sternum a couple of times towards the end.

Using the well-documented final days of Christ’s life, JCS of course uses music to connect with a generation that now has grey hair, along with many of their children and more than a sprinkling of grandchildren.

However, it is something of a shock to realise it is now more than fifty years since JCS was birthed. With Andrew Lloyd Webber’s driving rock score it broke new ground at the time and was eagerly awaited – but not entirely.

By the early 1970s we were a decade on from the Beatles and the Stones and a decade where popular music had taken a new direction. For some there were even more serious directions to take. It was a time for concept albums.

And just like The Kinks’s Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), or the Who’s Tommy, or Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick or even Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, creative musicians had paved the way for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to tell a well-established story from a book pretty much everyone knows, and found a new way to retell it – bringing Judas more into the scheme of things.

This particular concept album was eagerly awaited. I fondly remember sitting with a group of friends in a rather dingy flat just behind Sydney’s Kings Cross in 1971 and playing it over and over through the night when the long-due LP (remember them?) finally arrived.

But a staged production took a little longer. The Americans had a go but fell foul of dissenting voices – primarily over religious and racial divides (funny how some things don’t change) – and a rage of licensing issues. It took Australian impressario Robert Stigwood to take a punt, lock in the world-wide rights with the creators and convince fellow-Australian Jim Sharman to wave his magic director’s wand over things before it bounced onto the stage at the Westend’s Palace Theatre in 1972.

So while most other rock operas would tell the story of Jesus from the perspective of the man himself (the crossover between lead singer and preacher was a fairly well-trodden area even in 1970), JCS takes Judas’s point of view and throws some sympathetic light upon Mary Magdalene too.

Jesus might have been a charismatic leader, wise beyond his experience and adored by his sychophants. But they are only human. And it is Judas, manipulatively loyal and true, who misguidedly accepts the thirty pieces of silver, while Jesus becomes well aware of what is about to happen to him and resigns himself near-passively to his fate.

Perhaps cynically, I must admit I have always loved the closest thing Webber and Rice got to editorialising when the Apostles sing …

Always hoped that I’d be an apostle,

Knew that I would make it if I tried.

Then when we retire we can write the gospels,

So they’ll still talk about us when we’ve died

Go see it.

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Jeffrey Harris

Suite Gallery

April 28 – May 30

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Jeffrey Harris creates surreal environments and portraits where Christian iconography and the mundane create richly textured imagery. Scenes which may derive from personal experience become images of universal importance reflecting on sexuality, personal and spiritual relationships.

In his latest exhibition of new paintings at Suite Gallery Harris draws on a range of sources including artists of the Trecento such as Giotto and Colin McCahon. His cartoon-like approach to his subjects and the Christian imagery create a unique view of the social, psychological, and spiritual dilemmas of society.

His use of Christian symbolism, is similar to the way McCahon had approached religion and its iconography, imagining the life of Christ in a contemporary world, in a contemporary setting.

Jeffrey Harris, Hovering Angel over Stony Bay

This mix of landscape, symbolism and religious iconography is seen at its most obvious in “Hovering Angel over Stony Bay” ($75,000) where the angel represents spiritual presence, protection, and the intersection of heaven and earth. There is also a swimming pool / cattle water trough referencing Christs baptism, the baptismal font and the water of life.

A crucifixion scene set in the centre of the painting appears to be located at a precise position, indicated by a precise line bisecting the image.

The four vignettes in his “Journeys 1975 – 2026” ($95,000) owe much to surrealist artists such as de Chirico and Magritte. Each of the images composed of simple figures and objects which have populated much of the artist’s work. The elongated nude figures which allude the nude figure if Christ can probably also be read as a disenchanted, disillusioned Harris while many of the other figures – men with hats can be seen as bureaucrats or individual searching for the truth.

In these views of Harris’s world we are confronted figures who look back at us, questioning and querying. The objects in these paintings are at once recognisable and mysterious. The cloud in one can be linked to the early Christian mystical book “The Cloud of Unknowing” with its obscure attempts to the link the attaining of spiritual through mediation on the world rather than through enquiry.

In other works there are also strange symbols or sections of the Cross floating the air as well as a lone figure exhorting a group of people. These figures often found in his work confront the viewer but offer no lesson or reaction.

Throughout his works he depicts small objects, some instantly recognisable, other slightly obscure. They are like those images found in Renaissance painting, ordinary objects which have been chosen to convey the sitter’s wealth, status, piety, or intellect, functioning as a symbolic language rather than mere decoration. These symbols – an airplane, a book, various birds, black cats, a hot air balloon and a human head with horns give the paintings a sense of density and depth as well as the enigmatic.

The plane could be a reference to a series of McCahon works “Jet over Muriwai” which are a clever image connecting Māori and Christian / European notions of afterlife and isolation while the images of birds convey the idea of a free spirit as well as highlighting the balance between nature and divine narratives.

Jeffrey Harris, Crucifixion and Landscape

With “Crucifixion and Landscape” ($70,000) the artist places the event in an undefined location, although the hills could refer to the Southern Alps. The work like many artists of the last 100 years tries to place the Christian narrative in contemporary settings with the Christ figure symbolising the suffering and pain of individuals in contemporary society. In using Christian imagery Harris creates ambivalent narratives. While the Bible stories are about God/Christ, Harris uses them as symbols of human suffering, addressing issues of personal spirituality and angst.

With “Wedding 1975 – 2026” ($70,000) the artist has depicted a wedding party, but as with all his “secular” images there is a tension and unease with the wedding group most of whom are looking to the right beyond the picture frame. Knowing Harris’s liking of religion subjects this could well be a depiction of the wedding at Cana, and the group are watching Christ performing his miracle of turning water into wine.

With these painting the artist endeavours to create narratives combining biblical tales, recreated myths, dream sequences and psychological insights.