Godspell
Conceived and Originally Directed by John-Michael Tebelak
Music and New Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
Directed by Eve Muson
Olney Theatre Institute
Olney Theatre Center
Through July 29
By Alexander C. Kafka
In the book of theater history, it is written:
There was a directing student at Carnegie Mellon named John-Michael Tebelak, who had once considered becoming an Episcopal minister. He attended an Easter service in Pittsburgh and found it dour. The congregants, he felt, were glaring at him because he was young and had long hair. He decided to turn the New Testament’s Gospels into a show brimming with joy and spirit. The result, in 1970, was the first version of Godspell, which, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, went on to become an off-Broadway and then a Broadway hit, as well as a movie.
An ensemble piece with a book based on the Gospel of Saint Matthew and lyrics culled largely from the Episcopal Hymnal, it’s a perfect workshop vehicle in which actors can hone their group skills while also developing and shining in individual character efforts. That’s how Eve Muson has used it to generate the current uneven, but energetic and amiable, production at Olney Theatre Institute.
The appealing young cast greets the project with a warmth and spirit that Tebelak, one imagines, would
enjoy. (We can’t know, alas. He died in 1985, at 35, from a heart attack.) But Godspell’s workshop aura is, if you’ll forgive the expression in this context, both a blessing and a curse. On a minimal stage, with a bin of wacky dress-up costumes, an anachronistically modern Jesus and his followers act out and sing about parables like that of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, recite beatitudes, and both witness and enact, in a somewhat indirect way, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. Then, a vague, stylized crucifixion. The more wholesome cousin of Hair, the sunnier stepbrother of Jesus Christ, Superstar, Godspell is a Sunday school lesson steeped in clowning and Vaudeville, and anchored in a distinctly 70s soft rock and funk musical essence.Let us at least briefly nod to the fact that it’s a weird show. Its raison d’etre is to convey the deadly seriousness of Christ’s teachings and passing, and yet it treats (and sometimes, I think, undermines) them with an unrelentingly childlike approach. Its primary message is hope, but it has a deep nihilistic streak in some of the convolutions of the parables themselves, but also in tunes like “All for the Best,” a soft-shoe precursor to Monty Python’s “Don’t Let Life Get You Down” from Life of Brian. And it at once harnesses and shuns its sexual energy.
It has a lot of leeway for improvisation, and Muson and company take full advantage of that, updating the show with distressing news photos and broadcast headlines at the beginning, and photos representing hope and spiritual uplift at the end, making this revival something of a revival meeting. They’ve tweaked the dialogue to include post-70s references to the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” iPods, and so on. And their interactions are colored with a TV comedy sketch show sensibility.
That’s not all bad. It allows them to define and refine their individual mannerisms and physicality, and it keeps them on their ensemble toes. But it also makes for some herky-jerky pacing, stepped-on lines, and sometimes a snarkiness that doesn’t blend well with the work’s underlying flower-child sensibility. (That there is one layer of anachronism in the original script doesn’t mean a production can pile on multiple layers of additional anachronism without harm.)
Some of the costumes, designed by Vasilija Zivanic, have a random otherworldliness that contributes to that era disorientation. Jesus’s white outfit, combining a bowler hat with a sort of warmup-suit looking tux, works pretty well, as do Judas’s pimp duds. (Jesus’s lifeguard shirt, with red cross, and Judas’s “Fight the Power” T-shirt, are clever touches.) But some of the followers look like they’re dressed for the futuristic kids' show LazyTown with Stephanie and Sportacus. With all the acrobatics, there were occasional mic and sound problems, too.
For all that, this secular Jew enjoyed and was moved by Tebelak and Schwartz’s Christian primer. Liturgically, it preaches to the choir, no doubt, but a visitor at a distant philosophical pew can still groove to its basic buzz of good will, even aside from the cast's invitation to the audience to come onstage at intermission for grape juice.
Luke Smith, as Jesus, has a gentle air, a tender but powerful tenor voice, and some guitar chops too. OK, so “Alas for You” took him for a bit of a bronco ride, but man, that’s a treacherous tune. He would have benefited, even as gentle Jesus, from a somewhat more athletic presence, but he reminded me pleasantly of a younger Mark Lynn Baker.
L.C. Harden Jr., as John the Baptist and Judas, has a wonderfully sharp way about him, and a flair for the ironic snap moment, but his singing was weaker than Smith’s in both projection and intonation. Among the followers, standouts were Patricia Hurley in the opening of “Day by Day” (what a sweet voice), and Hurley and Rebecca LaChance in the lovely vocal tapestry of “By My Side.” Boo Killebrew was sassy and saucy in her “Turn Back, O Man,” which amusingly, um, rubbed up against Olney’s general family-show approach toward the script.
The trio of keyboardist Alvin Hough Jr., percussionist Brian Gibson, and guitarist/bassist Neil McFadden excelled in the demanding variety of the score, which ranges from Simon-&-Garfunkel-like soft-strum ballad to gospel to theatrical dual-key modernism.
“Every man who exalts himself shall be humbled,” Jesus said, “but every man who humbles himself shall be exalted.” Godspell exalts in its tuneful humility, and whether or not you feel its theological power, you’re bound to revel in its artistic vitality, as do Olney Institute’s promising young talents.
Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center: L.C. Harden and Luke Smith; Boo Killebrew
