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

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Just recently I got my first iPod. To those who are reading this in the future, or who hail from one of the millions of places in the world today in which such a device symbolizes unapproachable and perhaps undesirable luxury, such a statement may not have any cultural valence for you. But for those in the West, in the early twenty-first century, with even a trickle of disposable income, an iPod has fast become a staple accessory.

Only when I started really contemplating the hassle of carrying around so many CDs for much longer did I think that I might switch music media. This was not easy. But many of my conversions (at least on the conscious level) have been intellectual ones first, and this was kind of like that. I got to the point where I was comparing what it felt like to choose several CDs every time I got on the subway or the train, and to have to pack my computer, just so I could listen to even one song. And this meant, effectively, less music enjoyed as time went by, compared with the iPod. I don’t remember such a process of discernment when the Sony Walkman came out in the 1980s. I wanted one as soon as they appeared, though kept buying records for a few years, because I couldn’t afford a Walkman right away, and because I was attached to the experience of enjoying music at the turntable. But I eventually adjusted, amassed a vast collection of cassettes, and put most of my LPs in storage. The same dynamic pertained when I switched from cassette to CD, and the Discman, finally, in the mid-1990s. Except that I didn’t keep most of my cassettes. Unlike LPs, they wore out pretty easily, so I eventually shed almost all of them as my CD collection replaced cassettes which had replaced LPs. (We had 45s and 8-tracks around the house growing up in the 1970s, though I never purchased an 8-track. I did, however, like many friends, purchase 45s in the late 1970s and early ’80s. My first 45 was Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” purchased with my parents’ help for my 1st grade “Show and Tell” in 1974 or ’75. That’s another story.)

Now that I write this, I wonder if it is the experience of having been in so many musical-media relationships that expired that made me wary of taking up a new one. After 8-tracks, 45s, LPs, cassettes, and CDs, should I alight on a new medium that will only expire again in a few years, pulling my money and soon-to-be-dead devices into a needless grave?

Part 2 soon.

For now, in memory of the first 8-track I remember hearing in my house growing up: Godspell and “Light of the World” (starting at 6:55 in the clip below)….

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States