Critiques

It is not easy to succinctly summarize the aftermath and repercussions of this work. I have included a sprinkling of harsh criticism as well as effusive praise resulting from the music and productions.

“That record got me through high school.”

fan commenting on the album’s impact. (Nassour, 304)

“Even today, the show’s biblical blunders have proved too big for some Christians to stomach.”

From the National Catholic Reporter, October 9, 2021, Kathryn Post

Rice and Webber, once the single “Superstar” was released, knew that they needed a “leading clergyman to endorse the single.” “An obvious target was Martin Sullivan at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Martin was delighted to help and wrote, ‘There are some people who may be shocked by this record. I ask them to listen to it and think again. It is a desperate cry. Who are you Jesus Christ? is the urgent enquiry and a very proper one at that.’” (Rice, 117)

“Over the course of its history, JCS has lost a good deal of its contentious quality. London Theatre records that in 1999 it was officially endorsed even by the conservative Vatican and approved for inclusion in the 2000 Jubilee.” (Brewer, 119)

Dr. William Marra, assistant professor of philosophy at Fordham University did not hold back his harsh criticism:

“Civilized men like to believe their person, race, nationality, and their religion will be subject to ridicule or distortion in any public medium. We should rightly resent the slur, the unproved innuendo, the cowardly thrust which strikes with impunity. Jesus Christ Superstar is blasphemous. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber condemn themselves and their work by their own words.” (Nassour, 216)

“Superstar is more popular today than in 1971. For one thing, light rock is accepted and enjoyed by more people, including the faithful. And many who do not attend church still consider themselves “spiritual.” They, too, are discovering the power of the gospel story through these fresh, creative and exciting productions. (Beeman, 708)

“JCS offers a fully humanized and hence flawed Jesus. The story allows for his relationship with Mary Magdalen to be read as a physical one, and he appears self-interested as he allows himself to be indulged by her.” (Brewer, 113)

“[JCS ] aired on Vatican Radio, because, its controller remarked, ‘in this modern piece the suffering of Christ is seen with more human insight and the future of the Redeemer is brought even closer to mankind than through the Holy Scriptures’”. (Brewer, 114)

“The ending of the opera is strange and troubling and open to a variety of interpretations…The libretto invites us to read (but significantly, does not reproduce) John 19:41. The curious listener flips open his dusty Bible expecting reference to the resurrection and finds instead: ‘Now at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which nobody had yet been laid’. We are not instructed to read beyond this verse…There is no resurrection this time.” (Clanton, 26)

The album arrived just as Christian rock was beginning to emerge in the U.S.–Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” was a chart-topper in 1970, and the Jesus People’s Movement was blending the electric sounds of the 1960s-counterculture with evangelicalism. Jesus Christ Superstar hit the sweet spot: This was literally the first time a thoroughly Christian message was coming through rock-and-roll music, the dominant cultural medium for young people at the time”. (The National Catholic Reporter, Kathryn Post, October 9, 2021)

“Above all, it is a work of cinematic art which just might strengthen the viewer’s faith in its original story.” (Wall, 694)

“Many young people deemed in tabloid parlance “Jesus Freaks” were genuinely seeking a religion in harmony with a set of progressive values that they viewed in contradistinction to those of their parents. Though presented in a commercial form, JCS intersects with British countercultural aspirations in the 1960’s by using the story of Jesus to critique racism and intolerance, traditional sexual mores, political hypocrisy, and corrupt state institutions, including institutional religion.” (Brewer, 109)