The opening-night performance of the 1970 rock opera is set for Maundy Thursday, the day when Christians commemorate the Last Supper during the Lenten season. The musical continues on Good Friday and Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday, at The Palace Theatre, Greensburg.
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Both "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Godspell" hold a strangely special place in my heart. I was raised Unitarian Universalist and am a life long atheist, and yet, I have grown up with these two stories having a profound impact on me. While both shows are based on religious stories, they have weight because their message is universal and almost painfully human. When broken down, Jesus is just a man, albeit a wise one. Judas is just a friend who is plagued by doubt. It is easy to shove the religious iconography over the entire production and ignore this simple fact. Jesus Christ Superstar is a story of friendship, betrayal and pain that is perceived through an overwhelming cultural knowledge of the bible. As I hope this performance is doing, the performance is done best when religious status is ignored and the characters' humanity and pure formative emotion is retained.
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