• BC Christian News • MARCH ISSUE 2000 • VOL. 20 #3 • Formerly "Christian Info News" •

The Bible goes Broadway
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By Peter T. Chattaway

IT'S BEEN just over a quarter-century since Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell cashed in on the spiritual hunger of the Nixon era.

The film versions of both musicals were released in 1973. Their 25th anniversary came and went in 1998, and the commemorations were few and small: the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar was reissued on CD yet again and Godspell was finally released on video for the first time.

• Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice: Jesus Christ Superstar, MCA, 1973/1998.

Superstar remains popular, and with good reason. The tunes are catchy, electrifying and at times deeply passionate, and the lyrics, which dwell on the vacuity of modern celebrity culture, are as relevant as ever.

But the story is as consistently cynical and agnostic a deconstruction of the life of Jesus as anyone has ever put on film. Jesus, as presented here, is just an innocent weakling caught, almost off his guard, amid the power games of mindless zealots and ruthless political leaders.

Webber seems to have a special interest in placebo spirituality. In 1998, he returned to the theme with Whistle Down the Wind, a new musical based on an odd 1961 Hayley Mills movie about British children who mistake an escaped convict for the Christ.

• Stephen Schwartz: Godspell, Arista/ Gotee, 1974/1999.

Biblical themes also abound in the works of Stephen Schwartz, who composed the life-of-Jesus musical Godspell and the Oscar-winning life-of-Moses movie The Prince of Egypt.

The original cast album for Godspell was first released in 1974, a year after the film came out; last year, on the album's 25th anniversary, it was reissued by the Christian label Gotee, with endorsements in the liner notes from talents as varied as Martin Short (who performed in a stage version of the play way back when) and Michael W. Smith.

The music is a lively, infectious mix of early-1970s folk-rock and jazz-inflected show tunes, and at times it's downright worshipful (especially on 'Save the People' and 'Day by Day,' which DC Talk modernized a few years back on their Jesus Freak album). Yet there's a subtle undercurrent of despair beneath all the clowning around -- a recognition of the world's fallenness, you might say.

• Stephen Schwartz: Children of Eden, RCA Victor, 1998.

It's doubtful Schwartz himself would put it in those terms. Having tackled the lives of Jesus and Moses, he has also spent the past several years refining a musical about the creation of the world. Two years ago, an original cast recording of Children of Eden was released on CD, and it seems clear Schwartz's take on the expulsion from the Garden would differ from that of most Christians.

His approach to the creation itself is downright playful, however, and a thrill to hear: God (William Solo) sings enthusiastically of his plans to create "granite mountains and flaxen plains / giant lizards with tiny brains / fluorescent fish and crescent worms / and a billion bugs and a trillion germs."

But there's a darker and, perhaps, more troubling side to this production. Schwartz takes the rather bold and unusual step of making God himself a full-fledged character in the show. As the story progresses through the Fall and the Flood, he lurches from happiness to despair to anger and, in the end, resignation.

In the beginning, God tries to control his creations, dodging their questions and distracting them with "games" such as the naming of the animals; when the humans think for themselves, he punishes them severely. But by the musical's end, God says he has learned his lesson: "The hardest part of love . . . is letting go."

Eve (Stephanie Mills) and Cain (Darius deHaas) are presented here not as original sinners but as free thinkers who feel a restless "spark of creation" burning within them that compels them to break God's decrees. When Eve does eat the forbidden fruit, it reveals knowledge not of good and evil but, rather, science and agriculture -- knowledge, that is, of things that could make garden-bound humans independent of the Father who has penned them away in his perfect, but perfectly boring, paradise.

I am of two minds about this approach to the early chapters of Genesis. On the one hand, far too much time is already spent in popular drama romanticizing rebellious freedom for its own sake, without fully exploring its consequences. (Pleasantville, anyone?) Freedom without responsibility leads to chaos; and the only person who learns that lesson in the musical is, well, God.

And yet the Bible itself often portrays God in shockingly human terms, and at times his emotions even seem quite volatile. In Disappointment with God, Philip Yancey observed that the central theme of the Bible may be that God learned how to be a parent, granting his children more and more leeway until, in Jesus, he became one of them himself.

Children of Eden may err in making God too temperamental, but is it possible we Christians err in making God too distant, too emotionally uninvolved, even too transcendent? The truth behind our portrayals is probably somewhere in between.