Queer Intimacy: Vocality in Jesus Christ Superstar

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock opera depicting the last week of Jesus Christ’s life from the perspective of Judas Iscariot.¹ Norman Jewison’s 1973 adaptation of the rock opera into a musical film (hereafter JCS) is important to both musical film studies and the growing discourse of queer musicology because, I argue, the characters’ embodiment of authenticity through fraught vocality destabilizes the passion narrative not only by presenting Judas (Carl Anderson) as a tragic hero but also by depicting his relationship with Jesus (Ted Neeley) as embodying queer intimacy that is inflected by race, with a black Judas opposite a white Jesus.² To read Judas and Jesus’s relationship as queer is a departure from the film’s reception history and from contemporary representations of the Jesus figure in popular culture, which have strongly aligned him with heterosexual kinship structures.³

The film’s premiere was met with an overall positive popular reception.⁴ Reviews from critics, on the other hand, were mixed, and the film’s queer framing of erotics went largely undetected. Gary Arnold of the Washington Post said of the musical numbers that, “after coming on strenuously, many of the numbers seem to end with a shocking lack of either point or ceremony.” He further labeled the film as nothing more than a kitschy commercialization of the passion story. Arthur D. Murphy of Variety disliked the anachronistic use of such props as war tanks, claiming that the drama depended on “forced metaphor to [the] outright synthetic.”⁵ Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune disliked the actors’ characterization of the lead roles, calling them “so confused, so shapeless, [that] the film cannot succeed in any meaningful way.”⁶ Rotten Tomatoes, a review-aggregation website, gave the film a 55 percent rating, with the critique that “the miscasting and tonal monotony halts this musical’s groove.”⁷ US-based Jewish organizations gave the most condemning reviews, labeling the film anti-Semitic in its portrayal of a group of Jews as the most villainous characters (a prime example being the musical number “This Jesus Must Die,” sung not by the Romans who killed Jesus but by the Sanhedrin). This claim escalated to the point where the Israeli government issued a statement distancing itself from the film, which was shot on location in Israel.⁸ The film was labeled by some commentators not only as anti-Semitic but as antiblack and imperialistic through reference to a black Judas and an Asian American Mary Magdalene (Yvonne Elliman).⁹

JCS was also considered provocative in its portrayal of intimacy between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which characterized Jesus as a sexually integrated person rather than an asexual, transcendent messiah.¹⁰ The discourse concerning Jesus’s intimate relations is in line with other works (artistic and otherwise) that assume Jesus’s heterosexuality. In the gnostic Gospel of Philip, for example, Mary is called the most loved companion of Jesus, whom he frequently kisses on the mouth.¹¹ Other modern films have explored this theme, including The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), whose plot is based on Jesus being tempted to eschew his messianic duties and instead start a family with Mary.¹² In Stephenson Humphries-Brooks’s study on cinematic depictions of Jesus, the Mary of JCS is understood as desiring to be Jesus’s lover.¹³ This contention is supported by the torch ballad “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” sung by Mary. With Mary labeled the primary love interest, Jesus is firmly fixed to heteronormative scripts.

Despite this traditionally heteronormative reading of JCS, the gendered performance of the two leading high tenors of the musical film—in combination with their shared musical material, parallel virtuosic vocal failures, and tessitural intimacy—frustrates straight readings. Throughout the work, the actors suggest through their body language that Judas and Jesus know each other’s fears and weaknesses, more so than any other couple in the story. For instance, when Simon the Zealot suggests taking Rome by force, Judas and Jesus share a knowing glance of...