★★★★★
Adelaide did not get the full arena-sized production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Instead, it got something rarer.
What’s The Buzz? was billed as an access-all-areas concert and conversation with the Australian cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, stripping back the spectacle to share songs, road stories and backstage secrets for one night only at Festival Theatre.
The line-up included Michael Paynter as Jesus, Mahalia Barnes as Mary, Javon King as Judas, Reuben Kaye as Herod, Graeme Isaako as Simon Zealotes, Elliot Baker as Caiaphas, John O’Hara as Annas and Peter Murphy as Pilate. What emerged was not a cabaret spin-off but a communion.
The cast sat in chairs or around a Last Supper-style table adorned with real fruit, wine and candles. There was no giant set, no arena machinery, no huge chorus filling the stage. Just the people who had lived inside this musical, sitting together, watching each other sing, laughing at each other’s disasters, and occasionally revealing more than they intended.
Reuben Kaye, who played Herod in the Australian production, hosted the night with the wicked glee of someone who knows exactly how far he is allowed to go, and has already prepared reasons to go further. At the end of the show, he took Mary’s lines from What’s the Buzz? about cooling down Jesus’ face, singing them directly to Paynter.
Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera has always lived between devotion and provocation. Its anachronisms are part of the design. But Kaye, naturally, found ways to push even those limits.
He recounted performing at the matinee after the tequila-soaked opening night and slipping in an R-rated late-night sex joke. Another time, he sang Herod with a lisp, reasoning that he had heard Herod was inbred. With only a three-and-a-half-minute song in a 90-minute show, Kaye apparently found many ways to make mischief backstage. One involved dancing in the wings in a T-Rex outfit.
The best stories had the thrill of mythmaking. Peter Murphy shared that he had once played Jesus in a Scandinavian production when his “knees were better.” He now blames Kaye for the bad knees. Murphy’s Pilate’s Dream carried a lovely ache. As performers age, do they move from hero to villain? From Jesus to Pilate?
John O’Hara delivered another backstage gem. Usually, he was given his cue to enter. Once, the cue never came. So he raced on from backstage, already singing, trying to catch up with his own scene.
Javon King recalled getting his microphone stand stuck horizontally in front of him like a limbo pole as he tried to race off stage. The cast laughed like people who had survived the same shipwreck. Then came the surprise arrival.
Elliot Baker ran onto the stage to sing his Caiaphas parts after finishing a matinee of Anastasia in Sydney only hours earlier. Some cast members had only found out backstage; Kaye was in the dark. An extra chair was added. The joy was palpable: it is hard to fake that kind of delight. It belongs to people who have shared dressing rooms, airports, injuries, jokes and the peculiar madness of eight-show weeks.
The night also gave space to the understudies and alternates. They were able to sing some of the roles they did not always get the chance to play. There was even a duet of Judases. Neither betrayed the other.
Theologically, that may be dubious. Theatrically, it was bliss.
Kaye also offered a sincere reflection on his own casting. After controversy surrounding comments he had made about Jesus on The Project, he found himself in a production alongside devout Christians, including Paynter, Isaako and Baker. Kaye explained that, after railing against organised religion for much of his career, the show helped him place human faces on Christians. They were not as different from him as he had imagined.
Paynter, meanwhile, offered his own grace note. He said that while he was a minority in the company as a straight white man, the Jesus he believes in would love everyone in the cast, regardless of sexuality or religion.
In a time when almost everything seems designed to separate people into camps, What’s The Buzz? became an argument for singing together. Not agreeing. Not pretending difference does not exist. Singing. The body knows this before ideology catches up. Group singing releases oxytocin. It bonds people. We need more rooms where people who disagree can breathe in the same rhythm.
Then Paynter sang Gethsemane, and the room changed.
Jesus was a carpenter, but it is unlikely he had Michael Paynter’s biceps. Paynter appears to channel his faith through angelic vocal cords. He does not have to fake spiritual stakes.
As the song climbed, Paynter crouched down, head to the floor. A standing ovation erupted before he had finished. Then he rose, completed the number, and received another. It had the force of an operatic Nessun Dorma moment. The kind where applause is not etiquette, it is release. It was a miracle of a performance.
Jesus Christ Superstar has made many stars, including Marcia Hines. Paynter’s career may now be measured in two eras: before Superstar and after it. He can roar up and down the range. He does not need to retreat into falsetto for the high notes: he meets them head-on.
Mahalia Barnes was another vocal force. Like Paynter, she did not come from a conventional musical theatre background. But she has a soulful rock instrument that could only come from the Barnes bloodline. She joked about choreography and her reluctance to take direction. That made her presence even more endearing.
At times, Barnes’ powerhouse delivery can feel almost too full throttle. But that is a minor reservation. In a score this muscular, excess is not always a flaw; sometimes it is the point.
Paynter, King and Barnes all have voices that need to be heard to be believed. The real question is how any of them sustained this material eight times a week. But the night’s secret lay not in any one performer but in the ensemble memory.
The evening felt like a cast album with bruises. A reunion before the show had even become history. A backstage hallway opened to the public. You could feel the road under it.
That is why Adelaide was lucky. The city may not have received the full production, but it received something one-of-a-kind. A show made of songs, gossip, faith, mischief, vocal thunder and the strange family that forms when artists survive a phenomenon together.
What’s the buzz? This was.
What’s The Buzz? ran for one night only in an Adelaide exclusive premiere on 6 June as part of the 2026 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Tickets are on sale for all Cabaret Festival shows now at the website.
Website: https://cabaret.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adelaidecabaret/
Photo credits: Claudio Raschella
