★★★★☆
A guitarist stands in silhouette against a blood-red backdrop. Mark Lanigan-O’Keefe attacks Andrew Lloyd Webber’s opening riff, his shadow thrown across the stage as though Jimmy Page has wandered into Golgotha.
The image captures the challenge facing Therry Theatre. Jesus Christ Superstar belongs to musical theatre, but it was born from rock. A production needs singers who can reach its punishing heights, actors who can carry its tragedy and musicians willing to let the guitars draw blood.
Adelaide has been waiting for the full experience. The city missed the recent national revival while the Festival Theatre was closed for redevelopment. June’s one-night-only What’s The Buzz? gave us an extraordinary consolation prize.
Michael Paynter and Mahalia Barnes blew the roof off during the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, but that behind-the-scenes concert had neither full staging nor a large ensemble.
Therry has stepped into the breach. Its entire season sold out before opening.
Tim Rice and Lloyd Webber first released Jesus Christ Superstar as a concept album in 1970, with Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan as Jesus. Its success carried the work to Broadway in 1971.
The score was designed for the ear before directors added sets, choreography and character movement. Gillan was a metal singer tackling theatre. Every subsequent Jesus has faced the opposite question: can a theatre performer summon the necessary rock voice?
Director Ben Todd stages the final days of Jesus within a ruin. Aged brick walls sit on either side of the stage. Small staircases lead to raised platforms, allowing performers to watch, preach or plot from above. The open floor between them gives choreographer Rebekah Stonelaitken’s large ensemble room to surge around Jesus.
The production begins with that ensemble scrawling graffiti across the walls. Curtains and signs descend for key moments, while a rear screen offers occasional projected environments, including a garden during Gethsemane.
The set is most effective when bodies activate it. Followers perch on the stairs, priests occupy the upper levels and dancers flood the central space.
Todd introduces one decisive contemporary image. Riot police in helmets and body armour drive through the protesters behind large Perspex shields. It gives the occupation an immediate language of state violence. Yet most of the costuming and character imagery remains traditional, particularly among the priests.
The production consequently hovers between eras. Those riot shields promise a sharper present-day political reading that the remaining staging rarely pursues. Todd could have modernised the world more aggressively or trusted its established biblical iconography throughout.
Either choice carries risk. The Bible is scripture, but after 55 years, Jesus Christ Superstar has acquired its own scripture too.
Lighting supplies some of the production’s most striking images. A heavenly shaft pours down upon Nicholas Munday during Gethsemane. Smoke trails behind Judas as he collapses to his knees before his suicide. At the crucifixion, a red glow burns beneath the cross while Jesus struggles for air above it.
Nicholas Munday brings the necessary gravitas to Jesus. An environmental lawyer by day and a classically trained singer who studied at the Elder Conservatorium, he understands both the authority and isolation of the role. His acting during Gethsemane is superb. The argument with God travels through his entire body.
That dramatic commitment deepens during the Passion. Munday absorbs each strike of the whip, bears the crown of thorns and reduces his breathing to shallow, agonised gasps upon the cross. His cry of abandonment has genuine spiritual terror.
Vocally, Munday’s classical training is unmistakable. His rounded vowels and resonant operatic colour sit at some distance from Gillan or Paynter’s metallic rock attack.
Rock singers can use brightness and twang to drive through the score’s high Fs. Munday carries a fuller sound upwards, requiring careful vowel modification and some manoeuvring through the peaks.
It is a technically impressive achievement that changes the musical flavour of the role. A lifetime of classical training cannot simply be switched off for one production. Munday navigates the score successfully, although listeners waiting for an unrestrained metal howl will hear the difference.
Daniel Hamilton faces the same brutal vocal inheritance as Judas. The award-winning musical theatre performer, previously seen as Curly in Oklahoma! and the title characters in Jekyll & Hyde, can apply a rougher edge to his voice. It still sounds closer to musical theatre than native rock singing.
His dramatic arc compensates. With darkened eyes, a permanent scowl and a restless gait, Hamilton stalks the stage like a man already being consumed by his decision. He gives Judas’s betrayal emotional logic, then returns dressed in white for Superstar, liberated into joyous movement after death. The transformation provides one of the evening’s great releases.
Rebecca Pynor is the principal whose vocal instrument sits most naturally within the score. Her Mary has a velvety, rich and sultry tone. The love beneath I Don’t Know How to Love Him is already visible when she takes Jesus’s face between her hands. That physical tenderness keeps Mary from disappearing behind her two famous songs.
Deon Martino-Williams brings ringing energy to Simon, while Liam Phillips gives Peter a clear, sympathetic presence. Parisya Mosel is particularly impressive as Annas. His voice cuts cleanly through the rock guitars without sacrificing character.
Then Toby Strudwicke arrives as Herod and steals the show.
Making his Adelaide city theatre debut after performing on streets around the world and on regional stages in Balaklava, Strudwicke is carried on while reclining upon his throne. He presides over a flamboyantly dressed company and a tap-dancing production number with shameless delight.
The sequence embraces anachronism more confidently than anything around it. Strudwicke knows Herod has only minutes to make an impression and wastes none of them.
Stonelaitken’s choreography gives the production its pulse. The ensemble can resemble a crowd, congregation, protest movement or pack turning upon its former idol. Ava Cannard, who has spent around three-quarters of her 20 years dancing, repeatedly draws the eye without breaking the collective picture.
Musical director Matthew Rumley leads a ten-piece band that gives the score appropriate scale. Lanigan-O’Keefe and fellow guitarist Dylan Rufus are allowed moments to riff from the darkness rather than behaving like obedient pit musicians. The result meshes rock, classical singing and conventional musical theatre instead of pursuing two hours of balls-to-the-wall noise.
Purists may need to loosen their grip on the original recordings. They are landmarks, not gospel.
The sold-out season confirms the score of Jesus Christ Superstar has no need of resurrection. Therry gives Adelaide the bodies, movement and dramatic scale missing from June’s concert. Its strongest memory is quieter: Munday hanging above a low red glow, his breath shortening while the theatre waits with him.
Jesus Christ Superstar is presented by Therry Theatre and runs to 1 August at the Arts Theatre. 53 Angas Street Adelaide SA 5000.
The season is sold out.
Website: https://therry.org.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/therrytheatre/
Photo credits: Richard Parkhill
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