Jesus Christ Superstar, Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, review: all hail theatre’s Second Coming
Jeez, it’s joyously uplifting to see London theatre reborn and rocking again! Earlier this summer, Regent’s Park’s time-honoured al fresco theatre haunt appeared to have succumbed to the same dismal darkness afflicting the West End and elsewhere.
But after being forced to shelve the 2020 programme, artistic director Timothy Sheader and co have seized on the sudden go-ahead given to outdoor performances and achieved a minor miracle. Jesus Christ Superstar was first staged here in 2016. Lo and behold one of his best-loved productions – it won an Olivier – has been resurrected, employing a cast of 25 and 12-strong band. It’s the biggest live show since lockdown.
Sunshine or no, there’s little pretending it’s business as usual at this bucolic address. The old charming ambience is in short supply. What with the temperature checks, a surfeit of sanitiser points, snaking one-way systems and elaborate protocols at the bar, the prevailing impression is of visiting time at the prison. I can’t fully fathom why face-masks are de rigueur even when seated – an added layer of restriction – though I suppose they keep your lips from turning blue should the temperatures plummet.
On opening night the heavens did their best to delay the start then stop the show, first drizzle, then something heavier. Cue the laborious mopping of the set: a mighty array of tiered steps, cannibalised from another Andrew Lloyd Webber hit here, last year’s Evita (designer Tom Scutt tweaking the original handiwork of Soutra Gilmour).
To be frank, though, it would have taken a flood of Old Testament proportions to dampen the mood of the theatre-famished audience, sitting in socially distanced ‘bubbles’ but not so that the auditorium felt woefully under-attended. ‘Inside’, the numbers have shrunk from 1,256 to 390.
On a lawn outside, there’s further grassy ‘seating’ (which was very squelchy on Wednesday) for a spaced-out throng to catch the show relayed live on a big-screen. I imagine the spirit of Glastonbury might pop-up there; if so it’s a response that Sheader’s approach to Superstar, emphasising its core identity as a rock gig, bolting manically from one number to the next, facilitates.
Lloyd Webber has been theatreland’s self-anointed saviour during the Covid-19 crisis – what with trialling health and safety measures at his venues and gamely volunteering for the Oxford vaccine – but it’s his music (with barely bettered lyrics by Tim Rice) that’s the essential godsend. The raw, vital busy-ness of the score – tilting between frenzied funk licks and short-lived serenity, sacred sounds bedded beside the amplified, electrified thrust of the Sixties – serves as a wake-up rebuke to our slumbering, Covid-cowed capital. There’s never a dull moment, and that plugged-in energy finds its counterpoint in the modern staging, which keeps things tight and stark but never tips over into drabness.
Perhaps because of recent upheavals to the usual social order – the rise of rioting too – this incarnation feels unusually attuned to the musical’s contemplation of how the individual – Christ, Judas, and Pilate too – relates to the wider group. The dancers are kept on a tight leash choreographically by Drew McOnie to ensure due distancing – even exits and entrances have been plotted – but the constraints work wonders, intensifying the feverish rapture by which the disciples are seized (lots of face-palming and hands to heaven) as well as the fierce convulsions of the mob.
There are legion nice touches, from the minor synchronised inclinations of the heads of the Pharisees as they overhear the intrusive ‘hosannas’ of JC’s admirers, to the way Judas’s kiss of betrayal is denoted, simply, at one remove by a self-ministered daub of silver-paint on Christ’s cheek (Pepe Nufrio singing like an angel at this performance).
The microphones work overtime as a visual motif too – flexing round the captured messiah, throttling Iscariot (Ricardo Afonso a boiling sea of inner torment), with a mic-stand forming the crucifix through which Lee Curran’s lighting splinters into the night sky, vapour swirling like the Holy Ghost itself. A searing image of sublime transfiguration and a beacon of artistic hope for the downcast.
Jesus Christ Superstar: The Concert runs until Sept 27. Box office 0333 400 3562 or book online at openairtheatre.com