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On a darkish, featureless stage in Amsterdam, a soon-to-be-crucified Jesus Christ laments his predicament whereas sporting a shimmery tank-top and grey New Stability sneakers. His followers, gathered round him, seem like they’ve raided an City Outfitters retailer someday round 2012.
By stark distinction, his persecutors, led by King Herod and Pontius Pilate, put on extreme white, floor-length robes and black coats. In an earsplitting falsetto, Jesus reproaches his father, God, for having put him on this place. As effectively he would possibly.
This revival of “Jesus Christ Famous person,” Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s kitschy 1971 musical about the previous couple of days of Jesus’s life, is directed by the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. It’s an odd match.
Van Hove has constructed his fame on aesthetically putting, typically psychologically intense re-imaginings of well-known works — together with canonical performs (“Hedda Gabler” and a riveting “A View from the Bridge”); golden-age Hollywood films (“All About Eve”); and modern fiction (“Who Killed My Father” and “A Little Life”). And although his vary is large, there has at all times been mental ambition in his selection of material: a critical curiosity within the poetics of human tragedy.
So it’s laborious to fathom what drew him to “Jesus Christ Famous person,” a musical whose notoriety has been largely premised on the incongruity between its somber material and its disarmingly peppy, down-with-the-kids lingo. At occasions, the lyrics even have slightly pressured, knowingly foolish rhymes, akin to when Jesus implores God to “present me now that I might not be killed in useless? Present me just a bit of your omnipresent mind.” To transmute such willful inelegance into excessive artwork can be a miracle certainly.
The productions runs on the DeLaMar Theater by Feb. 18, with a solid that’s virtually completely Dutch, delivering songs in clean English. Magtel de Laat offers a powerful vocal efficiency because the prostitute Mary Magdalen, whose touchy-feely tenderness towards J.C. offended the sensibilities of Christian conservatives when the musical first appeared within the Seventies.
Together with his lengthy locks, wide-neck T-shirt and grey denims, Lucas Hamming’s Judas Iscariot, who narrates the story, has one thing of the beleaguered British comic Russell Model about him. It’s a powerful search for the half.
Within the title position, the Surinamese singer Jeangu Macrooy has an ethereal, deer-in-the-headlights vulnerability that may be a little laborious to sq. with the messiah’s much-vaunted charisma: His Jesus comes throughout extra just like the fey frontman of a mid-ranking indie band than a rabble-rousing revolutionary. When each Mary and Judas muse aloud on the key of his magnetism in “I Don’t Know The way to Love Him” (“I don’t see why he strikes me / He’s a person, he’s only a man!”), it feels all too actual.
In equity, nonetheless, the weak spot right here is the fabric, not the performers. Apart from one pivotal second — the betrayal of Jesus by Judas — there are few twists and turns. It’s principally exposition and wallowing. The present’s easy plot trajectory is neatly summed up in a dismal couplet within the lament “Gethsemane,” during which Jesus lastly resigns himself to his destiny: “Then, I used to be impressed / Now I’m unhappy and drained.”
The music (organized by Advert van Dijk) is a reliable remodeling of Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s authentic songs — a mix of basic rock riffs and poignant energy ballads — however there isn’t a lot selection. The timbre is both very up or very down, with solely the occasional curveball. A chipper, upbeat quantity performs throughout a scene during which Jesus is violently affected by his captors, and even briefly waterboarded. It’s darkly edgy, paying homage to Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s heyday.
The sung-through format, along with van Hove’s constancy to Rice’s lyric sheet, have a fatally constraining impact. Wanting rewriting the factor, the director should rely virtually completely on audiovisual results — the austere set and infrequently spectacular lighting results are by Jan Versweyveld — with the intention to flip it into one thing aside from bubble gum theater. Unsurprisingly, van Hove solely half succeeds.
Throughout one scene, during which a guilt-ridden Judas suffers paroxysms of regret, the lights blink on and off at jarringly sporadic intervals to intensify our sense of his psychological turmoil. However different gildings merely nod to an concept of avant-garde experimentalism with out truly enhancing the expertise: When the solid arms out wine bottles and glasses to viewers members through the Final Supper, it’s not immersive, it’s simply awkward.
The manufacturing’s strengths and weaknesses are succinctly represented in its closing scene. “Jesus Christ Famous person” ends with a bloody Jesus, arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose, propped up by his entourage and elevated beneath a shaft of deep orange mild that very progressively brightens — evocative of sunsets and sunrises, endings and beginnings — earlier than he’s drenched in a nice, mist-like rain allotted from a sprinkler system. It’s a surprising picture, fantastically rendered.
Moments earlier, nonetheless, members of the supporting solid had been smearing blood over one another’s torsos in a heavy-handed metaphor for his or her ethical complicity in Jesus’s demise. It felt overwrought and trite, like a sophomore art-school mission. Van Hove has a factor for bloody imagery: His Hedda Gabler was famously doused with tomato juice by the lascivious Decide Brack; “A View from the Bridge” ends with its solid being symbolically drenched in blood. It labored effectively then, however the trick has worn skinny.
Folks flocked to see “Jesus Christ Famous person” within the ’70s and ’80s, and, writing in The Occasions in 1993, Frank Wealthy steered that such rock operas had been musical theater’s clumsy try to win again the viewers base it had misplaced to rock ‘n’ roll.
Right this moment, guitar music itself is arguably as a lot a fixture of the nostalgia circuit as vaudeville, and so to revive a rock opera in 2023 is to heap kitsch upon kitsch. The one solution to make it work — when you should insist on doing it — would appear to by ramping up the humor and enthusiasm. Van Hove, for all his qualities, will not be famend for both.
Jesus Christ Famous person
By way of Feb. 18 on the DeLaMar Theater, in Amsterdam; delamar.nl
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