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Las Vegas, I think we’ve found your Savior, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Little feels fresh in Broadway’s latest production of this 1971 rock musical about Jesus’ crucifixion, except that it often looks like “a mildly naughty floor show at Caesars Palace.” Imported from Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, this version never quite overcomes the original show’s “preposterous” marriage of religious martyrdom and “splashy pop spectacle.” In fact, director Des McAnuff pumps the show with so much kitschy glitter that when Jesus chases the moneylenders from the temple, the scene “could be transported wholesale into a Britney Spears concert.”
McAnuff “has never met a scaffold, an elevated catwalk,” or a stadium-style lighting effect that he didn’t love, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Still, he is diligently faithful to the creators’ intentions. The score is still packed with “some of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s catchiest tunes,” and McAnuff “stages the numbers with an urgency that won’t quit.” Yes, the “folky guitars, wailing rock falsettos, and hippified lyrics” betray Jesus Christ Superstar as 1970s artifact, but that doesn’t make it any less of “an entertaining guilty pleasure.”
You’d think Paul Nolan would notice all the kitschy fanfare surrounding him, said Scott Brown in New York. But Nolan, while delivering his songs “in great, glittery voice,” creates a somber Jesus “so cosmically at odds with the intrinsic goofiness of Superstar’s design and execution” that he could have stepped out of a dead-serious Passion Play. Jesus’ distaste for the spotlight lets our attention fall on Judas’ tortured introspection, on a “scene-stealing” Bruce Dow as King Herod, and on Chilina Kennedy’s lovely rendition of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” But McAnuff fails in an apparent attempt to mix high camp with “baleful, Occupy the Second Temple fury,” and the show only occasionally becomes “the arena concert of sheer rock nonsense” that it should be.
