Musicals Take the Passion out of Jesus’ Last Days on Earth

Everyone, it seems, loves to speculate about how Jesus Christ would react to the modern world and how today’s world would treat him.

Would he take to television evangelism? Would he buy commercial time during the Super Bowl to spread the Gospel? Would he return as a high-profile religious leader? Would he once again appear as a modest carpenter, and if so, as Woody Allen once pondered, what would he charge for bookshelves?

Judging from two Orange County theatrical treatments of the Messiah’s last week on Earth, some folks evidently feel that here in the ‘80s, the Man from Galilee would make his case with laser technology.

In both “The Glory of Easter” at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and “Jesus Christ Superstar” at Golden West College, the Savior’s proclamation “I am the light” is illustrated with enough laser activity to ward off Darth Vader.

But I would like to think that if Jesus attended either of these shows dramatizing his life, the first thing he would do is go out and commission a top-notch songwriter.

Nit-picking? Not at all. While prose is the communication of the mind, music is the language of the soul. And when it comes to music, both of these religious dramas missed the ark.

The songs written for “The Glory of Easter,” at best, are forgettable; at worst, they trivialize the monumental subject.

When Mary Magdalene contemplates the compassion that Jesus shows her, actress Jonal Dayen Christensen launches into “How Can I Repay Him?” a song by Toby Waldowski that makes it sound as if her concern is how much of a tip to leave.

After Jesus restores sight to a blind man, he sings David Meece’s “I Can See,” a bland statement that conveys none of the awe or magic of such a miracle.

Granted, it is no easy chore to come up with music that adequately captures the spirituality, the glory and the majesty of the Greatest Story Ever Told.

It can be done, though, as Bach proved in his sublime “St. Matthew Passion.”

Yes, you say, but Bach is long dead, and besides, the Crystal Cathedral is presenting a nice little Easter show with a couple of quick songs, not an oratorio.

But even within a pop music framework, producers of “The Glory of Easter” could have done a lot better.

Many of rock’s most prized artists have addressed matters of faith in artistic expressions that approach the divine.

The man who regained his sight would have been far more convincing with Van Morrison’s revelatory “Tore Down a la Rimbaud,” which celebrates the opening up of the singer’s eyes:

(He) showed me visions, showed me nightmares

Gave me dreams that never end

Showed me light out of the tunnel

When there was darkness all around instead

And Bob Dylan’s haunting “I Believe in You,” from his 1979 Christian-theme album “Slow Train Coming,” would fit perfectly into Mary Magdalene’s scene:

That which you’ve given me today

Is worth more than I could pay

And no matter what they say

I believe in you . . .

Though the earth may shake me

Though my friends forsake me

Even that couldn’t make me go back

“Jesus Christ Superstar” is another matter entirely. Though the Golden West College drama department put its all into staging this 1971 “rock opera,” to most rock fans--not to mention theater aficionados--this mock-hip treatise is a hopelessly dated relic.

Lyricist Tim Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber set out to give a modern, “with-it” twist to the Passion Play but succeeded only in coming up with a wisecracking, eardrum-whacking sideshow.

Rice’s banal lyrics often make you want to shudder (condemning Jesus for opposing the reigning religious orthodoxy, Caiaphas concedes: “One thing I’ll say for him, Jesus is cool”). Lloyd Webber’s fatuous non-melodies leave you wondering what, in heaven’s name, he hoped to accomplish.

Anyone who wants to stage a genuinely insightful religious musical with a rock foundation should forget “Jesus Christ Superstar” and look instead to songs by T Bone Burnett, Peter Case, Lone Justice, U2 and others whose Christianity is skillfully articulated in their music.

On his latest album, “The Talking Animals,” Burnett sings about a faith that is inescapable:

“You are relentless (This mercy convulses my pride)

You are relentless (I find you wherever I hide)

You are relentless (I have got nothing to win)

And so I give in

Peter Case, a Los Angeles singer and songwriter, created his own contemporary version of the Resurrection, couched as the fable of a mine-shaft accident, in “Three Days Straight,” a song from his 1986 debut album:

It was dark as a dungeon, cold as a tomb

There was nowhere left when the light broke through

Was a living hell I was lifted from

The light brighter than an atom bomb

It doesn’t seem too much to ask an Easter tribute to deliver songs more like those that must have inspired Alexander Pope when he wrote: “Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven.”