That's right - I went to see one of my favourite musicals of all time. It's hard to pinpoint exactly *why* I love Jesus Christ, Superstar so much. Possibly because it's a little sexy. Possibly because it's a little bit blasphemous. But more probably because it's really campy, and is full of the long, high loud notes that win you American Idol (hang in there until 1:35 - totally worth it).
So I was of two minds when I arrived in "downtown" Invercargill at 9:45 on a Monday and heard the JC Superstar was coming to town. My thoughts were as follows:
1) Curse my luck - I really wish they'd been doing Joseph. I saw an excellent version of JC Superstar in Kingston, and this one probably won't be as good.
2) Well, i better go, since the only musical I've seen in the past year was My Fair Lady. And we all know how that turned out.
I'd pretty much determined to go, and found out that night that the lovely young woman I was staying with was part of the backstage crew for the production. So I ordered my ticket online that week and went to see the show. Which, incidentally, was on Kyle's 28th birthday.
A real WTF query
Note: this image requires a bit of explanation. Yes, it's a random mis-mash of things on the web. As per usual when I do posts, I tend to just Googleimage whatever I'm looking for (with the Safesearch off, of course) and pick the image that's closest to what I'm looking for. Sometimes it yields hilarious or awkward results, like for a time "hot guy pancakes" brought up this image as hit #3.
Someone's horny.
However, if you do this today you end up getting pictures of pancakes, pictures of sausages, a girl in a tube top, a cartoon of Obama with a pancake on his head and a link to the Historical Love Fiction "Mission of Hope." Try it, I dare you.
So . . . cheer if you love tangents . . . or pancakes. Anyway, I ended up posting the JC Fabulous search page because there was nothing even close to what I was looking for. I was hoping for a cute cartoon of Jesus, maybe dressed in a big purple robe, or wearing glitter and mascara, looking something like a cross between Dr. Frank N'Furter and the runway coach from America's Next Top Model. You know, the little Hispanic one with the silver dyed hair who's actually the most sane person on the show.
As you can see three images ago, my image search was "Fabulous Jesus Christ." I think this is an appropriate place to do the breakdown ala Tosh.0. Oh, and if you don't know who Daniel Tosh is, you should Youtube some of his comedy when you're done reading this post. He's *almost* as funny as this blog. And you should also check out his show on Comedy Central, which is sort of like Joel McHale's The Soup for the Interwebs. If you didn't understand this entire paragraph, I would suggest you need to watch a lot more of Kathy Griffin's stand up. God I miss American television.
Down here all we ever get is Coronation Street.
So getting back to the Tosh.0 Breakdown, let's refer to the original "Jesus Christ Fabulous" search. You will note that my SafeSearch is off, as always, for maximum opportunity to invoke Rule 34.
Top line: This line was actually pretty close. There was a "Faggot Jesus" in one of the boxes, what appeared to be three stills from actual stage performances, and a link to the TV Show "Absolutely Fabulous" (which is terrible, by the way, despite Jennifer Saunders being an awesome vocalist). Dammit, now I'm wishing she'd been in the cast of Jesus Christ, Superstar.
Second line: This is where the search really falls apart. The image on the left is a guy we'll call "Mario" and we'll guess that he lives in West Hollywood. The 2nd image is a doodle of some special needs version of Skeeter. The third one is either the cast of Big Love, three generations of Mennonites, or three generations of Mennonites on Big Love. The 4th image is a happy couple, the 5th a ceramic of the last supper, and the final one is some guy we'll call "Bolo" who has a new hat and wants to use it to pick up ladies on the internet.
Third line: This one just got weird. We've got two pencil drawings, a couple on vacation (in 2004, it looks like), a coed in a hoodie, an image of the Ambassadors for Jesus Christ motorcycle gang, and what appears to be a bald Twilek with a horse-hair wig singing Don't Cry for me Argentina. This one should have been the money shot, but failed miserably. What kind of a drag queen wears white when you're NOT doing "Barbra Does Celine?"
For those of you who got laid in high school, the Twileks are the blue Star Wars race with the weird tentacle things coming out of their heads.
So, yeah . . . Google Image FAIL.
I actually had to pour myself a glass of wine because this is taking so long. I'm at 913 words already, and I haven't even started on what was wrong with Heaven on their Minds. Or begun to complain about the lady who sat beside me. Mmmnnnn $8.99 Pinot Gris.
It's probably a good time to set the stage for this review. The show was put on by the Southland Community Theatre group, which is comprised entirely of volunteers who have real lives and jobs, and pour their hearts and souls into two productions a year for the community as a whole. Keep in mind that Southland has a population of less than 100,000 people and roughly 5.7 million sheeply. Hilariously, it's the same size as Maryland, which has 5.7 million people and, you guessed it, 100,000 Cubans. Getting back to my main, and slightly less racist point, I tried to keep my expectations as realistic as possible.
To be as fair to this production as possible, I'm going to note instances where I thought the Kingston JC Superstar was brilliant, and then outline how my each aspect was not paralleled by the Southland version.
Misses - Costumes
Costumes for this production can be admittedly tricky, as it's a period piece from a time when wearing flip flops and a cloth diaper were all the rage. For those of you who still live in Dunedin, you will appreciate that flip flops and a cloth diaper do seem to have made a comeback. In JC Superstar, you expect to see this:
Not a guy who looks like this, wearing what appears to be this. Pacific Guy Mesh Shirt sort of did the trick, Google Images.
Yep, Judas was wearing a mesh shirt during Heaven on Their Minds. At the end of the Kingston production, Judas (who looked like David Arquette) was wearing this for the title number Superstar.
Nice and fancy, a bit ironic to be worn by a dead guy.
Judas in Southland, by contrast, was wearing this.
See? I can be sexy . . .
I wish to Baby Jesus that I was making all of this up, and I also wish that these had been the only two mesh tops that Judas wore that night. They weren't.
Hits - Costumes
Some of you may remember, way back on my first ever post on this blog, when I started off a review with a disclaimer about partial nudity. What I experienced in Southland was a bit of a cultural difference between Canada and New Zealand.
Canada - the programme warns about partial nudity, but in reality there's just a whole lot of smoke and the stage is dark while Hotty McHotterson runs off in his boxers (FYI - this dude is Matt Cavenaugh, and he performed at the 2009 Tony Awards as part of the West Side Story cast)
Not sure if he did the pull-ups on the balcony like the guy in Stratford. But I like to imagine he did
New Zealand - no mention of partial nudity, even though there's a scene where all of Jesus toga-bearing worshipers lie down, more or less on top of one another, on the stage, and claw and reach out towards him like the Inferi reaching for Harry when he was trapped in the sea cave. Wait, that might have been Dumbledore reaching for Harry. Either way, it kind of looked like this.
OK, I just wanted to show a screenshot from Spartacus: Blood & Sand
Overall Rating
Music - 3/4
Staging - 2/4 due to me not really getting it
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Captain Awesome's Final Thoughts
Once again, Kiwi audiences nearly ruined the performance. The couple sitting beside me was unbelievably annoying. You know how you can attend a performance, and plan to clap at the Intermission, and the Finale, and possibly after Fantine sings I Dreamed a Dream? Yeah, that's called a classy evening out.
But occasionally, you get stuck in a performance where the audience decides to clap after Every. Frigging. Song. It's just embarrassing, to be completely honest. How is the cast supposed to know if they did good when you're clapping for everyone? What I'm saying is, they basically turned it into American Idol without Simon. So I'm stuck in this performance, where the audience is clapping after every damn song, and the lady beside me is actually the person starting the clap. Seriously. About halfway through eachsong, she get her hands up in front of her, like this, just to make sure she'd be the first one:
Wait for it . . .
Then she'd wait until she felt the song was sufficiently over to clap. But the thing with Andrew Lloyd Webber, is he loves to modulate. Often three or four times in the same song, and occasionally after only an eight-bar measure in one of they keys. So for one song she got two claps in before she realized there was a whole other stanza. The twit. I couldn't feel sorry for her, but I think the point she was trying to make was "I came on opening night, and I'm the first one to clap after every song, so I must have excellent taste in music." You know, because it's as important to have good taste in 2011 as it was in Jane Austen's Bath.
From this same evolutionary failure, I get to repeat my observations from the last review I did. South Islanders: I did NOT spend $50 to hear your dumb ass explain the plot to your deaf husband. It's a musical, not a movie with an incredibly deep, complex plot. It also means that I don't want to hear your deaf husband point out stuff that's happening on stage, while something ELSE is going on on the stage. Sometimes in musicals two things have to happen at once. Seriously, whenever the stage started spinning, or a character snuck onstage while someone else was talking, the husband felt the need to point, and say loudly mumble something to the effect of "there's someone coming onstage."
Bitch, this aint TV. When you talk - I can HEAR you.
That's it for me, and the next review will quite possibly be the gayest musical on the planet staged in the queerest city in the planet. New South Wales, bring your A-Game.
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