The manslaughtering pharmacist turned down drunk from It’s a Wonderful Life played Jesus?! That’s almost as weird as Bela Lugosi having played Him.
One of the batshit craziest televangelists (who wanted to be huge but never got there) was Jeff Fenholt(left side-long hair). Fenholt was a former rocker who was involved with Black Sabbath (though his version and the band’s version of his involvement were very different) and he played the lead in JCS on Broadway briefly and road tour. He claims to have been saved while high on LSD and in JCS one night (how odd that tripping while suspended from a cross with people calling you Jesus would inspire religious imagery) and devoted his life to becoming a loud and obnoxious and jawdroppingly misinformed preacher. He had a show for a while on TBN (one of the few times I watched he was advising a schizophrenic woman that she wasn’t suffering from a physiological ailment- “YOU’RE TAKIN’ ON SPIRITS!!!”). He also toured college campuses- didn’t often bother with those pesky permits and things- and particularly loved doing ambushes on New Age stores to tell the customers and owners they were “TAKIN’ ON SPIRITS!” and going to burn in Hell (restraining orders and arrest warrants issued at least a couple of times). I think even TBN realized “Okay, cuckoo for cocoa puffs on aisle 9” at some point because he stopped appearing.
Anyway, I’ve wondered how often he’s called them up to get his Jesus job back on the tour. He said that he had tried to rewrite the musical after being born again with a more Christian theme (basically add in the Resurrection) but was threatened with lawsuits (yeah, some owners of extremely lucrative intellectual properties are like that when you try to steal their works- pity you can’t just write your own musical about Jesus but I guess the Bible owners would sue him also- [actually there is a musical about the Resurrection written to be coincide with JCS and there was no problem so long as they didn’t mention JCS in their promotion.)
I saw Neeley with Carl Anderson and Dennis DeYoung as Pilate (or his understudy, actually) 15-20 years ago and he was great. I think stage craft is so abstract that it doesn’t matter as much about casting as movies do. Stage productions often are star driven, so the Name actor gets the asses in the seats even if there are more talented performers out there. I think back with great pride that I saw several productions with significant performers, even if they were past their prime. Like Richard Harris in Camelot, Topol in Fiddler on the Roof, Joel Grey in Cabaret, Michael Crawford singing Andrew Lloyd Webber songs, The Sex Pistols, and some others that don’t come to me right now. I don’t care beyond a casual remark that they couldn’t hit the same notes, or do the same steps. It’s just cool as hell that I’ve seen Richard Harris play King Arthur live.
I saw that too and loved it, and even though he was a grandfather playing a teenager in the opening scenes you didn’t notice. Then I saw the HBO production of the play (the stage play filmed live) and the closeups where you saw his wrinkles ruined it. It’s the magic of stage.
I saw Yul Brynner in The King and I around the same time when he was his early 60s and beginning to suffer from cancer he still owned that role, and though he’d played it literally thousands of times by then it did not show (or at least not to a starstruck teenager).
I am wondering howTheodore Bikel, who is taking over for Topol (who had to drop out due to an injury after a fall down some stairs) in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF until Harvey Fierstein takes over, will do. He’s a great singer, he’s played the role as often if not more often than Topol, but he’s 85 years old; I saw him on stage in D.C. a few years ago and he looked old though still sounded as vibrant as ever, though in the play he was playing an ancient rabbi as well. In this 2 year old videohe looked and sounded amazing for a then 83 year old.
Maybe he’s just bored otherwise. He’s been doing the same thing over and over and over…
His age made the performance weird, in my view. He’s clearly an old man, and that weakened his interaction with the disciples. He’s now not one of them, he’s their father (or grandfather). The scenes with Mary Magdalene definitely had a slightly pervy vibe, for this reason.
I will never ever get over the fact that nowadays whenever I see the words Pontius Pilate, no matter how hard I try, I get the word “pilates” and am subjected to THE stupidest mental image ever conceived.
:: hijack over ::
And yes, Neeley is too old to play Jesus, but I’d totally be there if I had the chance.
I saw Ted Neeley in the role last year and thought he was amazing. Throughout the show, it never — not even for a moment — struck me that he was too old.
Out of curiosity, how close is the Neeley stage show to the movie in the way its staged and costumed? Do they have guards carrying machine guns as in the movie? Is Herod Antipas still a fat flamer like Josh Mostel*? I know that Anderson toured until health made him drop out and Ellison did a tour with him at one time, but are the replacements clearly replacements for Anderson and Ellison in looks/wardrobe/voice?
I love the play but not the movie, and the only thing I really liked about the movie was the on-location shootings in Israel which they can’t very easily duplicate.
*I way preferred Rik Mayall’s version to Mostel’s. Antipas a eunuchy sissy-boy flower child? He offered half his kingdom for a lapdance from his jailbait niece/grandniece/stepdaughter, which is why I like Mayall’s debauched, worldweary, slightly deranged (inbred?) playboy interpretation.
I don’t remember much in terms of staging or costuming from when I saw it last year, except for this: Herod wore bright orange Crocs. One doesn’t forget something like that.
It’s nothing like the movie. No hippies. Each major production puts its own spin on it and usually modernizes it. When I saw it once, it was staged like an 80-90s rock concert. The “moneychangers” were selling T-Shirts. Next time I saw it, it was more industrial, like a Nine Inch Nails show, almost.
Herod is always comic relief and is done differently every actor.
