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 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,” said McKinney.
The Broadway production wasn’t as immediately successful as the album. Critics loathed the gaudy production, and Christians bristled at the show’s depiction of romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, its choice of Judas as narrator and its lack of resurrection. Billy Graham said the show “bordered on blasphemy,” and in a 2021 interview, Ted Neeley, the original understudy for the Jesus role on Broadway, said,Every single performance was protested by people calling it sacrilegious. They would try to keep us from going in the stage door.”
Even today, the show’s biblical blunders have proved too big for some Christians to stomach.
“I mainly love it, but I love it in spite of myself,” said Mark Goodacre, professor of religious studies at Duke University. “As a New Testament scholar, I have all sorts of problems with it. But I so love the music. And I also think that a lot of Tim Rice’s rather cheesy lyrics occasionally hit that moment of genius.”
One sticking point is Rice and Webber’s depiction of a human Christ who is overwhelmed by his followers, exhausted from his ministry and unsure what the crucifixion is for. “Show me there’s a reason for your wanting me to die, You’re far too keen on where and how, but not so hot on why,” he sings in “Gethsemane.”
Jesus’ human nature is further explored in his relationship with Mary Magdalene. In the original Broadway production, the two “fondle and kiss each other,” according to a 1971 New York Times review. Subsequent interpretations have taken a more subtle approach, but still, Mary Magdalene’s character is largely reduced to her struggle with romantic feelings for Jesus.
“It’s one of the most disappointing things about the show in many ways, that it simply buys into the once-popular cliché but complete fallacy that Mary Magdalene is a sex worker,” said Goodacre, who noted the ways Rice and Webber conflated Mary Magdalene with other biblical figures such as Mary of Bethany, the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7, and the woman caught in adultery in John 8.
Rice and Weber also made the bold move to end the show with the crucifixion. Still, Goodacre said, directors have to decide how to portray Jesus during the curtain call — if he returns in “glorious arrayments” rather than crucifixion garb, the result can be “a sort of resurrection.”
