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What with skeletons from above, electrical lines snaking about and two-ton floor slabs heaving up and down, the production is downright dangerous for the players. So far, only a few toes have been broken, but the cast has already asked for extra danger pay. Fortunately they are young (average age 21) and fleet of foot, as well as accustomed to the fast pace that O'Morgan likes and that they had to follow in putting the show together. O'Horgan took over at a moment of crisis in August, and eventually had to cast Superstar's 40 parts in a two-week marathon session. The smell of burning pot and ambition filled the theater, as some 500 candidates, more than a hundred each for the major roles, tried out. One unsuccessful competitor recalls that you couldn't tell the Judas candidates from the Jesus candidates, except that some guys "would periodically kiss someone and burst into gales of maniacal laughter." Many were from the Superstar concert companies, as well as from 14 companies of Hair, O'Horgan's biggest hit.
It was a little like the old New York Yankees summoning up 20-game winners from the farm system. Various Hair troupes produced Superstar's Judas and Jesus. A Superstar concert tour and the LP provided Mary Magdalene and Pilate. "There's a special kind of singer needed for rock opera," O'Horgan explains. "It's much more gut, more street. We have vocal ranges in this show that no one could produce without a mike, not even Birgit Nilsson."
Pale Galilean
As personified by a slender tenor named Jeff Fenholt, 21, the Christ of Superstar bears a startling resemblance to those portraits of the pale Galilean that used to be hung in children's bedrooms all over the country—a vision that has helped turn so many of the hip young off contemporary religion. Hawaii-born Yvonne Elliman, 19, has just the right combination of sweet, gentle good looks and crooning pop ballad style to suggest that Magdalene is really two Marys rolled into one. As Judas, Ben Vereen, 24, has one of the more physically demanding roles in the history of Broadway. Not only must he sing at great length—in a style that suggests Sammy Davis Jr. imitating Chuck Berry—but, in the torment of guilt, he hops and dances around like a man in the grip of epilepsy or leeches.
One reason that O'Horgan's staging is a marathon exercise is that Lloyd Webber's music never stops—a rarity for Broadway musicals. The musical score has been criticized for being something less, or more, than rock. It is, in fact, an elegant pastiche, swiftly paced and highly styled, that does not sound like show music but has something for everybody: a curtain-raising blues number to loosen up the audience, a winsome torch song sung to the sleeping Jesus by an awed Mary Magdalene, and a campy Charleston-like piece that allows King Herod, outrageously turned out as a transvestite, to make fun of Jesus: "Prove to me that you're no fool, walk across my swimming pool."