Having already made an enormous bundle of money for its proprietors, Jesus Christ Superstar arrived on broadway last week disguised as a circus. On records (three million sold) and in concert, Superstar is a simple, moving rock opera, the story of Christ's Passion told in the vernacular. In the $700,000 musical version, simplicity has been overpowered by the staging: by dancing dwarfs, shuffling lepers, hooded demons and enough elaborate hardware to delight the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thanks to director Tom O'Horgan, the stage floor doubles as the curtain, there are smoke machines, laser beams and wind machines. people descend from the ceiling on intricate bridges and appear out of the floor wearing incredible costumes. "The circusy elements fit right in," O'Horgan claims. "They are in the tradition of of hundreds of years of church theatrics." Superstar's appealing music and lyrics are still there, and there are compelling performances by Ben Vereen as Judas and Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene. But the humanness of Christ, a central concept of the work, has been buried under the ruck of show-biz gimmickry. None of this, however, is likely to affect Superstar's further financial success: it has an advance sale of more than $1 million, and waiting time for tickets is already measured by months.
Tom O'Horgan, long black hair pulled back with a rubber band, black mustache drooping, blue shirttails out over the beginnings of a pot belly, sits calmly in the front row of the Mark Hellenger Theater like a Buddha in mufti. "Okay," he says quietly, "Onstage, lepers." He smiles and nods as some 20 young men and women, his creations, wearing very stylized rags, weave out from the two sides of the stage and go through their gyrating paces. After the rehearsal, one of the lepers comes downstage. "I wonder how the nuns liked the show last night," he says. "They were in the first row, and every night I see the way people look there. They're afraid we're going to come into the audience and get them."
"That's because of my shows," O'Horgan explains needlessly. The 45-year old bachelor from Chicago, who began his career as a comic harpest, developed an avid avant-garde following as a director committed to "total theater" with the Off-Off-broadway Cafe La Mama and turned into a Broadway hitmaker with his brilliantly successful staging of Hair, is well known for his theatrical tricks. In an O'Horgan production one expects to be shocked: nudity in Hair, verbal and visual assault on the audience in Lenny. "I've been very respectable in this show," he says of Jesus Christ Superstar. "But this is meant to involve the audience with the magical passages of ideas and feelings onstage, not to antagonize them.
"I thought for a first opera it was a remarkable young work," he says. "Of course, I didn't know I was getting into a remake of A Night At The Opera. But then I love the Marx Brothers." Of course, he let himself in for it, with his elaborately complicated staging and design. The sound system, vital to the production, was still, a week before the opening, a major problem. the soloists use hand microphones, and O'Horgan noted that the exchange of mikes from soloist to soloist had become the main subplot of the play. For a man who possesses the creative energy to take on a work like Superstar and knead a cast of 42 young, relatively inexperienced singer-actors into a company able to perform an exhausting play every night, he is remarkably cool, even amused at the chaos around him.
He came to his vision of the production, he says, by a process of elimination. "You could do this show in heavy vinyl motorcycle, or use a hypodermic crucifix and a Jaggeresque Jesus, but the libretto doesn't support that. Nor does it support a realistic treatment."
His kind of theater, he claims, is a form of sculpture, and indeed his best effects in Superstar are just that: when Judas hangs himself, his body in sculpted silhouette is hauled over 40 feet above the stage. "We have objects," says O'Horgan, "sculptural pieces that do things. Traditional theater pretends that something real is happening on stage. We're saying, 'There's a ritual to be performed, and we're doing it.' It's easy to do traditional theater, and the reaction you get is in the same proportion. I don't think anyone will come out feeling neutral about this."
He was right. Among the opening night reviews, some were raves, some pans, some mixed. But nobody was neutral.
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