[Theaterfan101]

Is JCS an atheist play or a religious play? I believe that the lyrics indicate that Judas is in conflict with Jesus because he feels Jesus abandoned a game plane in which he claims to be the son of God, even when he is not. Please vote and state your opinion.

[jcstar]

Judas' whole point in JCS is "Could you REALLY be what you SAY you are? Are you the Son of God or not?"

It's up to the audience to decide.

"We're not a religious play" Carl Anderson said in 1993.

JCS is trying to portray Jesus and the other characters as human beings.

"This isn't the way it did happen or didn't happen," Tim Rice has said on several occasions, "It's the way it could have happened."

JCS doesn't try to push anything on you. It simply asks questions. It's a jumping off point for your own ideas.

Andy.

[krisavalon]

I would call it "secular," but not "Atheist." There's a huge difference. It isn't trying to push any kind of dogma or lack thereof, but merely present the events as illustrated in scripture, as Judas may have seen them, while emphasizing the humanity of Jesus and his disciples. Tim Rice talks about this in an interview which you can find in the bonus features of the Jesus Christ Superstar (1973 film) Special Edition DVD.

[Ghost]

It really depends on the production.

To me, any good production simply thells the story and lets the audience decide weather Jesus was divine or not.

That's why I hate it when a production has a ressurection -scene at the end.

That's just not what the show is about to me.

[xalexx543x]

Some of the lines that they say are from the Bible.
How could it be atheist???



I don't think its atheist at all.
I think they leave a question at the end of the show not forcing anything, but half the people in the show come for CHRIST!

[Lazarus (Adam G)]

[xalexx543x]

I see what you are saying.

[Theaterfan101]

I guess the real question is, did ALW and Tim Rice mean for it to be atheist or religous?

[jcstar]

Danny Zolli told me that since the Resurrection was never intended to be a part of JCS, it was supposed to be a human take on the story.

HOWEVER, he also said that it depends on how the characters are portrayed. "If you play the role as human, the deity will come through. It can't be forced."

Tim Rice and Carl Anderson have saisd on several occasion that JCS is not a religious play. It's simply a jumping off point for your own ideas.

People who take Superstar as a religious play and/or blasphemey have never seen the show or really listened to the music.

I don'tn think JCS makes any statements to either side, really. It all comes down to the actors and how they play the roles... and how the audience reacts to it.

Andy.

[xalexx543x]

On the 2000 DVD they say in a interview with Rice that he was saying "this is what I would do if I was in this situation" or something like that.

[Theaterfan101]

[Brother Marvin Hinten, S.]

Sort of. (And that's Judas, by the way. We give out points for spelling here.)

Tim said something along the lines of, "I wanted to put down what I would do if I were in this situation. It wasn't even about, 'let's make Judas an interesting guy,' it was, 'this is such an interesting situation...here's how I think I would have reacted.'"

[thewordisno]

I think that the story line may be considered many things but NOT atheistic. I personally believe that it is an agnostic show.

For starters atheists, technically, is one who denies the existence of any supreme being or deity. There is no denial in JCS that God exists. Even Judas makes nods to him. The role of Jesus as God's son is the question, not the role of God as God. Therefore it is potentially a very Jewish look at the situation. But with the amount of blame that it places on the Jews in Jesus's death, unlikely.

Contrastingly, an agnostic is one who believes that God is unknowable as he is outside of the realms of our comprehension, or that God is relevant to each individual as comprehended through his/her own studies and experiences of the deity. That's exactly how JCS portrays the situation, in a light that lets one decide on an individual basis.

There you have my two cents.

[Beagle On Stage]

I don't even know that it places blame on the Jews that appear in it. It's a lot like "The Passion of the Christ" in that, yes, we see a few priests who have it in for Jesus, and an angry mob makes a brief appearance under the domination of those priests, but for the most part, the Jewish characters are sympathetic. With most depictions of the death of Jesus, the blame largely falls on Pilate making the ultimate decision, but even he gets background and some justification in JCS. In my eyes, the show does a good job of showing the historical reality: the blame belongs to MANY people - the general public in Jerusalem for the Passover week, Pilate, Jewish priests, even the Apostles who deserted Jesus - and doesn't condemn any one party as being completely responsible.

I don't think you can give the show itself a perspective. Individual productions do that. We've all seen several that end with a glorious resurrected Christ; these are obviously Christian. There are also productions that portray Jesus as a superficial fool who eventually dies babbling hysterically on the cross; these are the other extreme (not atheist, as thewordisno points out). Then of course the "agnostic" ones that keep a balance. But the score itself does absolutely nothing in the way of making any concrete statement. It asks the question without giving the answer, and it's much more interesting that way.

[Theaterfan101]

you are all making very good points. I guess I do agree that it can't be atheist if it is only saying that Jesus was not the son of God, not that God didn't exists. But do any of you think that maybe you are answering based on your own religous belief and not what the play accually says?

[jcstar]

I am basing my points on the libretto and interviews given by Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Ted Neeley, Carl Anderson, Barry Dennen, Danny Zolli... etc, etc.

Andy.

[Krankor]

The whole beauty of the work is that it is ambiguous. If you are a believer, there is enough in there to support your point of view. If you are NOT a believer, there is also plenty there for you. Especially when you go back to the original album (the movie, for instance, changed some lines to make it a little more overtly christian). Really, the whole thing is a big question mark: the opera tells the story of the events, reaches the climactic point (where Pilate sentences Jesus to death), and there the story freezes, as the voice of the author, in the guise of the spirit of Judas from beyond the grave, surveying the events that we have just watched, from the vantage point of 2000 years later, comments on the action and his commentary boils down to this: What the heck happened here? It's all right there in the title song (which too many people miss the point of because they can't get past the angelic voices singing "Jesus Christ! Superstar!"). The whole show boils down to this song, the lament of a modern person looking back across the millenia and trying to make sense of the biblical story:

Every time I look at you [Jesus] I don't understand
why you let the things you did get so out of hand.
You'd have managed better if you'd had it planned.
Why'd you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?
If you'd come today [1970, when this was written] you would have reached a whole nation
Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication

...I only want to know: Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ:
Who are you? What have you sacrificed?
Jesus Christ, Superstar:
Do you think you're what they say you are?

At the core of the whole thing: questions. Not answers. This show is not espousing a point of view, it's raising questions for you the audience to think about and draw your own conclusions.

And this is why performances that try to portray the thing as a rah-rah Christianity thing are TOTALLY missing the point.

[thewordisno]

[Theaterfan101]

[Krankor]

Well, for my part, I don't think I'm speaking out of my own beliefs. I am a devout atheist, but as I said, I don't think the opera is necessarily atheistic (or, a-christian). I see evidence on both sides. On the anti-christian side, there's the fact that those who are closest to Jesus continually assert that "he's just a man". The fact that he perpetually *fails* to perform miracles (for Herod, for the sick/lame/poor guys... "Heal yourselves!" is one of my favorite lines, and it sucks that they changed it for the movie). On the pro-christian side, there's the way that he does seem to have foreknowledge-- knows Judas is betraying him, knows Peter will deny him, knows his own fate (of course, it could be argued that his own fate was rather a self-fulfilling prophesy).

[Beagle On Stage]

Of course, the "foreknowledge" doesn't portray the Jesus of JCS in any special light. All of those predictions appear in the Bible as historical events, just like anything else that happens in the plot of the show.

[Tom]

[Lazarus (Adam G)]

I know I'll get heat for this, but Godspell is nothing more than the retarded brother of JCS. It blows.

[Tom]

[Jekkienumber24601]

I think Superstar is very accurate. Nothing in it can really be challanged by the bible. I hear arguments about Jesus saying "I'm amazed that men like you can be so shallow thick and slow" but I recall Jesus scrutinizing the apostles on various occasions. And if done like the Ted Neeley tour the "they don't even show the ressurection" argument can be settled as Jesus performs multiple miracles and that in the production.

[The Pirate King]

[ultra_lilac]

I love that it remains ambiguous all the way through. We never learn whether Jesus is right or whether Judas is right.
Both men are shown to be flawed in their own way and both are sacrificed for their beliefs.
The audience is left to make up their own mind, and that's what elevates the whole thing above being a campy bible romp.

[Krankor]