Jesus' divine Broadway season

What a divine season it is for Jesus on Broadway. On one stage, nuns make a joyful noise in Sister Act. On another, he figures highly in The Book of Mormon. Yet another has him as the central figure in Godspell. And he is now in revival - here, we're talking Broadway more than theology - in an effusive Jesus Christ Superstar, the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened Thursday.

It's full of powerful, melodic '70s-tinged music - the show premiered in 1971 and "I Don't Know How to Love Him" broke out to become a hit. The score, with Rice's clever lyrics and Lloyd Webbers many fanfare songs, is great fun to hear again, or probably also for the first time.  

Superstar, sung through, is faithful in its scenes to the story of the last week of Jesus' life - and its opening comes just ahead of Passover (which falls during the plot, of course) and the aftermath, Easter. In Des McAnuff's fast-moving production, the timing is everything: it's played under a wide arch of metal scaffolding, with a Times Square-type news crawl running in lights across the back of Robert Brill's set to announce the number of days before Passover in the plot, and to list the setting of each scene.

That crawl and other word projections by video designer Sean Nieuwenhuis figure large in the sweeping ending of the musical, a stunning use of multimedia that employs scripture and other material to bring us from Biblical times straight back to the present.

Still, that comes after a bright-light crucifixion scene, a blinding touch of Las Vegas among a few kitschy aspects of the production. Jesus' pompous entrance - unintentionally funny to me - is another. He arrives in standout white, into a scene of those who will become his apostles, all of them dressed in other general everyday colors (Paul Tazewell's costumes). Has he exercised the bad judgment to wear summer clothes well before the season?

I kept thinking what would Jesus do? as I watched Paul Nolan, a regular at the Stratford Shakespeare festival - originators of this revival - in the role. Nolan plays Jesus as a put-upon superstar, a humorless figure who displays no flash of being real until the very end. It's hard to admire this Jesus, or even to empathize. Given that we know the end of the story, the portrayal should grab us, or else it's a mere recitation of history, not a drama.

Nolan does have a clear, sharp voice - and despite over-amplification that occasionally distorts lyrics, his singing and that of the cast in general is the show's real savior.

Josh Young's Judas is a standout, not just for his powerful singing but his ability to act through song. Chilina Kennedy's Mary Magdalene, Tom Hewitt's Pontius Pilate and Bruce Dow's goofy King Herod come off just so, and Lisa Shriver's choreography makes for dandy dancing disciples. While this revival may not present the superstar of our dreams, it provides solid musical reasons to walk in its ways.

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Jesus Christ Superstar is at the Neil Simon Theatre, 250 W. 52d St., New York.