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Such comments, and the attendant controversy, have had the inevitable result. Almost overnight they guaranteed that Jesus Christ Superstar, already jingling along three days after its opening with one of the largest ($1.2 million) advance sales in Broadway history, will become the one show of the season that must be seen to be believed —or doubted. Superstar tickets are $60 a pair from your friendly scalper.
British Producer Robert Stigwood is cheerfully predicting that the show, in all its numerous concert and stage guises and disguises, will gross $20 million by this time next year. Whether the crowds who come get their money's worth or not, they are likely to be at least as stirred to pleasure or rage as the first-night audience was. They can hardly be more divided than the New York critics, whose judgment ranged from "flat, pallid and actually pointless" (Post) to "stunningly effective" (Daily News).
Fortunately, critics did not have to review Stigwood's opening-night party for 1,000, which took place at The Tavern on the Green. Like an army of extras for a Fellini movie, the guests turned out to nibble at hams decorated to resemble Indonesian masks, and to dance until 4 a.m. to live rock. Transvestites right out of The Damned, complete with dark red lipstick and 1930s feather boas, shouldered their way slinkily past matrons from Westchester. One unidentified chap wore a beige net jumpsuit with nothing on underneath, and a woman in gray velvet knickers pulled her off-the-shoulder blouse well below her bosom, while photographers immortalized the view.
Broadway is used to money, boffo musicals and first-night madness. Box-office records, like prices, gradually escalate. Even by those commercial Broadway standards, Jesus Christ Superstar has a good deal going for it besides controversy: eclectic, tuneful rock music, a dramatic book with the most famous cast of characters in Western history, frenetic staging. But there is more to the phenomenon than that.
Spiritual Fervor
To begin with, as a sign of the electronic times. Superstar is the only Broadway musical ever to have grown from an LP record album that sold in the millions before the opening. First its theme-song single, then the concert album, and finally two concert production groups swept campuses, parishes and high schools in the U.S., appealing to young and old alike. ("I know a woman who's at least 45 and she's going," said an amazed teen-ager from Utica, N.Y., about a local concert.)
More important, Superstar's popularity is a symptom and partial result of the current wave of spiritual fervor among the young known as the Jesus Revolution (TIME cover, June 21). Whether it is a sign of Spenglerian decadence or religious renaissance, there is an obvious yearning to consider Christ not merely as a fellow rebel against worldliness and war, but as history's most persistent and accessible symbol of purity and brotherly love. As a conservative Protestant weekly, Christianity Today, pointed out: "Many Christians have ignored this generation's questions about Jesus. For those who will listen, Superstar tells what young people are saying."