Drawing 35 - Groovy Palm Sunday
Apr. 5th, 2009 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinIt was a tradition in the household in which I lived during most of my time in Canada that we'd come home from church and put on some loud choral music we could sing along with while we made brunch. Sometimes it was Carmina Burana, sometimes Mozart's Requiem, but during Lent, especially towards Holy Week, more often than not it was Jesus Christ Superstar. I realized last week how much I missed that, so on my way home from church I stopped in the CD store and found a copy – it wasn't the original cast, in fact I couldn't find a mention of the production or cast on it anywhere, but I got it anyway because it was the only complete recording they had, and might as well expand my horizons a little.
To my surprise, it wasn't actually awful. It was recorded in '96 which, according to Amazon, was only three years after the original recording came out on CD, which seems a bit odd. The orchestra was smaller but it was nice to hear different parts stand out a bit more, and the recording quality was excellent. I even liked some of the performances better than the original cast – Jesus sounded less like a petulant child on drugs, and Pilate was more human and much less camp. The biggest surprise (or possibly non-surprise) was that Alice Cooper made an excellent Herod. Overall it was performed more in a Broadway style and less as a groovy 70s rock opera, which has pros and cons. My biggest complaint was that a few lyrics were changed, including some lines in my favourite verse in my favourite song, in a manner that erred on the side of stupid. Some of the lyric changes in Sunset Boulevard, when it crossed the pond at about the same time as this recording was released, were equally dumb; I suspect someone in Andrew Lloyd Webber's camp suspects American audiences of being a bit thick. (I don't know where they would get that idea ...)
Has anyone else noticed that an inordinate number of Webber's musicals are about the ramifications of fame?
Anyway, it's been a long time since I listened to it, and it got me thinking again about how controversial it is in some circles. I'm not surprised, because I know people will get offended at anything, but ... see, my mom spent all of maybe five minutes explaining the premise to me when I was a child, and even though I've never seen a performance and I don't recall ever hearing the whole musical before college, just that explanation had a profound effect on my perception of the Passion. Even now it's still my favourite dramatic interpretation of it, and the focus on the power of the fickle mob probably predisposed me to René Girard's mind-bending theories. I started to write a point-by-point list guessing at what people might find offensive and then explaining why they're full of crap, but it started to get really long so I stopped ... might post it someday if anyone's interested but I don't have the time right now to finish it or to join the conversation it might start. Instead I decided to offend more people by illustrating a mondegreen!
A trick or two with lepers and the whole town's on its feet ... 'lepers' sounds like 'leopards' to me most of the time. Jesus probably could have done tricks with leopards! That would have been awesome! Maybe he did but the Evangelists were embarrassed by the blatant showmanship so left it out of the Gospels...
And that, I have declared, counts for Monday. Take that!
To my surprise, it wasn't actually awful. It was recorded in '96 which, according to Amazon, was only three years after the original recording came out on CD, which seems a bit odd. The orchestra was smaller but it was nice to hear different parts stand out a bit more, and the recording quality was excellent. I even liked some of the performances better than the original cast – Jesus sounded less like a petulant child on drugs, and Pilate was more human and much less camp. The biggest surprise (or possibly non-surprise) was that Alice Cooper made an excellent Herod. Overall it was performed more in a Broadway style and less as a groovy 70s rock opera, which has pros and cons. My biggest complaint was that a few lyrics were changed, including some lines in my favourite verse in my favourite song, in a manner that erred on the side of stupid. Some of the lyric changes in Sunset Boulevard, when it crossed the pond at about the same time as this recording was released, were equally dumb; I suspect someone in Andrew Lloyd Webber's camp suspects American audiences of being a bit thick. (I don't know where they would get that idea ...)
Has anyone else noticed that an inordinate number of Webber's musicals are about the ramifications of fame?
Anyway, it's been a long time since I listened to it, and it got me thinking again about how controversial it is in some circles. I'm not surprised, because I know people will get offended at anything, but ... see, my mom spent all of maybe five minutes explaining the premise to me when I was a child, and even though I've never seen a performance and I don't recall ever hearing the whole musical before college, just that explanation had a profound effect on my perception of the Passion. Even now it's still my favourite dramatic interpretation of it, and the focus on the power of the fickle mob probably predisposed me to René Girard's mind-bending theories. I started to write a point-by-point list guessing at what people might find offensive and then explaining why they're full of crap, but it started to get really long so I stopped ... might post it someday if anyone's interested but I don't have the time right now to finish it or to join the conversation it might start. Instead I decided to offend more people by illustrating a mondegreen!
A trick or two with lepers and the whole town's on its feet ... 'lepers' sounds like 'leopards' to me most of the time. Jesus probably could have done tricks with leopards! That would have been awesome! Maybe he did but the Evangelists were embarrassed by the blatant showmanship so left it out of the Gospels...
And that, I have declared, counts for Monday. Take that!
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Date: 2009-04-06 08:48 pm (UTC)If you do explore, LJ about it! I've walked a lot of the trails, but never crossed the L.A. River. Griffith Park isn't a great place to be after dark...