For the third weekend in a row I have a theatre show for you. And this year after missing out on the last couple of summer’s hit Andrew Lloyd Webber revivals basically because I had seen them before in other productions and wasn’t prepared to pay top whack for something I hadn’t loved before just because it had a big star and then regretted it because they became the hot ticket, sell out raves, this year I was in the queue for tickets for Jesus Christ Superstar tickets as soon as they went on sale. Admittedly this is mostly because my Theatre Friend Tom is a massive Eurovision fan and: Sam Ryder, but also I like to think we learn from our mistakes. And so, this Sunday you have my review of the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber revival – which is also the last of his Mega Hits/principle works* that I hadn’t seen live.
And here’s the thing. What I learned from this is that I don’t like Jesus Christ Superstar. I just don’t. Sam Ryder was singing the heck out of the score and Richard Armitage was great as Herod (much better than Boy George who we were originally scheduled to see would have been) but it’s just not a show for me. I had forgotten/blocked out that the only reason I owned (and occasionally watched bits of) the film of the 2000 revival was because it had my teen theatre crush Tony Vincent in it as Simon Zealotes (even though he originally played Judas in the Broadway revival that recording was based on). But I’ve never bothered to see it live until now and I feel like now I’ve seen it once I never need to see it again.
But I am clearly in the minority here. It has sold phenomenally well – if you were trying to get a ticket for this summer run at the Palladium now you’d struggle to get one for under £100, so even though our tickets were the most expensive ones I’ve bought this year we still got a bargain compared to that – and it’s moving to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane after Hercules closes there for a run from October to January and then it’s touring. The audience when we saw it were wildly enthusiastic – with an attempt at a mid show standing ovation for Gethsemane – and seemingly quite a lot of non-theatre regulars. This is not the first time I have found myself out of step with prevailing trends – after all I didn’t really like Hadestown that much (I would rather sit through this JCS again than Hadestown) and everyone else loves that. And that’s fine. (Almost) Anything that gets people into theatres is a good thing – because the industry needs regular theatre goers to survive.
But if you were a visitor to London and asking me what to see this summer, I’d be sending you elsewhere – unless you specifically said “I want to see an Andrew Lloyd Webber mega musical” because even though this expensive it’s not this summer’s very hottest ticket because that’s Hamilton with Leslie Odom Jnr, which is really the thing to see if you want to make people jealous. Not that I’m still bitter about my total lack of success in getting tickets for that.
Have a great Sunday, and I leave you with the aforementioned Tony Vincent doing Superstar on American TV in 2000, which contains two of the three things I (reliably like) in JCS: the classic “Jesus Christ Superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are” phrase and the lyric “Israel in four BC had no mass communication”. (The third is Herod’s song)
*Principle is a tricky one to define, but at this point I have seen: Joseph (more than once), JCS, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express (more than once), Phantom of the Opera (more than once), Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind. I haven’t seen The Likes of Us, Jeeves, Tell Me On A Sunday, Song and Dance, Cricket, Beautiful Game, Woman in White, Love Never Dies, Wizard of Oz (with his additions at any rate) Stephen Ward, School of Rock, and (Bad) Cinderella. I’ll let you decide whether that’s all the main ones.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 