More Jesus Christ, Superstar

While looking for more decent original videos not long ago, I happened upon this theater group from Holland known as the Vollendam Superstars. These people aren't professionals--they're amateurs and many reportedly don't even speak English other than the lines and songs that they learned for this production. If you listen to their performance, many of them replicate the lines of the original 1973 players right down to accents and inflections. But the result is fantastic, and they deserve a lot of credit.

Most notable though is Jan Dulles, the singer/actor who plays Judas, reprising Carl Anderson's role in the original. Dulles actually has some experience, and he's really, really good. I'm impressed, and I suspect that Carl Anderson would be, too.




Still, I have to give it to the original. Ted Neeley played Jesus well and contrasted perfectly with Anderson's Judas.




Barry Dennan was hard to top as Pontius Pilate, too.



Great productions like this don't come along often, and thirty-five years later, it's still great. Get a copy and watch the whole thing this week-end. You'll enjoy it, and if nothing else, it'll help you remember what Easter's supposed to be about--very real events that took place 2,000 years ago that make all the difference for us today.

Easter Week-end

It's Good Friday today--the day set aside to remember the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. I thought about what to post this week-end. I debated putting up the images of Lagniappe looking at the flat and very dead easter bunny again, but then even though it's funny, I've done that at least twice already.

So setting politics and guns aside for a bit, this year I think I'll post a few videos from my favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Jesus Christ, Superstar. I'll begin with the opening to the original 1973 film version in which the late Carl Anderson just nails the part of Judas, Jesus' disillusioned and traitorous disciple.

I really like this one, both because Anderson is so good, but also because, in late 2003, I began an e-mail correspondence with Carl Anderson after I (finally) saw this film for the first time and sent him a short e-mail to tell him how impressed I was. We exchanged several e-mails and he told me that he was still touring and promised to arrange a back stage pass to let me meet him during his then-pending show that was going to be near where I was at the time. I was still looking forward to that meeting when I was saddened to read of his death from Leukemia just a few months later. Damn shame. He had real talent and seemed like a nice guy.
So here he is, as Judas, in 1973.