Last Thursday, I saw the new production of Godspell on Broadway. I was eager to see it, because I grew up listening to this music and it has never left my mental-emotional-somatic soundtrack. In other words, I cathected these tunes a long time ago, and the memories that accumulate around their hearing make each new listening even richer, a new discovery and a revisiting of old territory.

This is an extraordinarily energized production, with a diverse, youthful cast who work as hard as any company I have seen in a very long time. And their focus has to stay exceptional because this incarnation of Godspell is — except for the few slower tunes — a nonstop religious frenesis. It most resembles a postmodern vaudeville: all the traditional songs are there, yes, but they have been intercut by an Internet-jetstream of pop cultural references, from phrases to song lyrics to melodies to physical gestures. Even some of the classic Godspell songs have been reworked in new formats, as rap, hip-hop, hard rock, or ballad.

The show is in the round, at the Circle in the Square theater, with the band (four guitars) scattered individually throughout the theater, seated amidst fans. As I have noticed in several recent Broadway shows, the drummer was aloft in a special box. The musicians all relied on audio cues through earphones, and seemed rarely to look at each other. It was an odd diminution of the rock band aspect of the musical, but they were remarkably tight, and the sound was clean and appropriately loud but not overwhelming.

The downside of this production was that at times it felt gimmicky. As one cultural reference or attempt at a joke after another comes flying, and as the pratfalls multiply, you may wonder why they are working so very hard to

sauce up a musical that so many people seem to already love. That’s because, as written, the show is rather thin, although this production provided a powerful ending.

Most of the show consists of a string of Jesus’ sayings and stories/parables, drawn primarily from the “synoptic gospels” (Mark, Matthew, Luke), though the script focuses on the Matthean (that is, from Matthew) versions of these sayings. Jesus is portrayed as a wry, aloof ethical teacher who offers his followers nugget after nugget of life advice. The characters are barely developed. There is no narrative arc to speak of.

With this kind of material to work with, productions typically find that either they must mirror the movie…

…or come up with new musico-visual frames to effectively pad the weak script. This Broadway production mostly opted for the latter, although echoes of the movie are sprinkled liberally throughout.

Theologically, there are a few interesting things going on. Jesus is portrayed, in the movie and in this production, as a clownish/vaudevillian figure, an echo of a much older tradition of Jesus’ portrayal as a “holy fool,” as a liberated and liberating madman — a motif piggybacking on some characterizations of him as mentally unstable in the Christian scriptures. (For an argument that Jesus was executed because he was regarded by Roman authorities as a “deranged and deluded lunatic,” see Justin J. Meggitt, “The Madness of King Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 29:4 (2007), 379-413.)

On a different theological note, this production invited people to come forward at intermission to join the cast on stage to “have some wine,” while the band vamped hard rock pumped even louder through the speakers. Hundreds of little plastic cups full of grape juice were brought onto the stage and soon it was filled with dancing and imbibing and bewildered theatergoers mingling with the cast. It was a little making-fun of communion ritual, it was a little loving partaking in a traditionally Christian (here, low-church Protestant) practice, and I marveled at how this echo of a very old religious ritual was reworked for an interreligious and intersecular audience… with a new but old twist: drinking the “wine” meant ascending the stage and sharing in the party. I have never before seen the connection between communion/eucharist and the miracle attributed to Jesus at the Cana wedding party (the famous water-to-wine scene) overlaid, but here it was: communion was a rock and roll party. In the Christian scriptural symbology, Cana was Communion. These connections have been made for a long time in scriptural interpretation, but are rarely explored in ritual action. Through this Broadway production, art and theological tradition thereby again give each other new possibilities.

Here is a picture I took of the “wine”:

There is also the matter of Jesus’ suffering and death in Godspell. In the second act, Jesus’ ethical sayings suddenly transition to a passion narrative. And famously, there is no resurrection scene. Jesus dies, and the cast sings (paradoxically, “foolishly,” crazily, piously, mournfully, hopefully) “Long Live God.” Here is the scene from the movie:

In the Broadway production, Jesus’ corpse is processed around the stage and carried out the door of the theater into a strong white light. I took this to be the “postmodern” theological conclusion to this “postmodern” production: if you want to know whether his life is finally finished, seek that bright light coming from that door to the world. The communion party is the rehearsal, no, is the show itself, that makes one ready to say yes to whatever light can call us to and through that portal. This exit is also an entrance.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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