Godspell
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
Script by John-Michael Tebelak
Directed by Tim Gregory
Musical Director, Alaric Rokko Jans
At the Provision Theater in Chicago
A review of the performance on Aug. 28, 2010
The word "Godspell" is Old English for "good message". It doesn't matter whether we broaden that meaning to include "good news", "good tidings", or something similar, because it all points directly to the Christian belief in the expiation of man's sins by Jesus' crucifixion. Despite my being a nonbeliever and a decided nonenthusiast of rock music, Godspell is to me a respectable entry in the canon of American musical theatre, not because of its music, ironically, but because of its unique eloquence as an advocate for stripping away the myth, superstition, and chauvinism from religion in order to reveal its pith: the power to abstract reality, to liberate us from our limitations, and to pass down the lessons of experience.
Godspell is a musical play comprising a series of parables from the Gospel of Matthew, though it also includes a few from Luke. The songs are distinctly rock in character, but the styles of folk, vaudeville, and gospel bring a variety of colors to the music. Many of the lyrics come verbatim from traditional hymns. The cast is often an ensemble of clowns following Jesus, while the set is typically an open space, such as an abandoned building or a playground, large enough to allow for vertical and horizontal acrobatics. As entertainment, Godspell can be enjoyable and rewarding, but one shouldn't expect it to meet the responsibilities of "great" theatre, musical or not. I say this for at least three reasons. First, it lacks the musical depth of the many classics that address similar questions of human behavior, such as West Side Story, South Pacific, and Carousel. Second, its emotional and intellectual demands on the cast and audience are comparatively light. Third, the play flirts almost constantly with mawkishness, even when performed well. But I hasten to add that, in the hands of an alert director and a skillful cast, its joyfulness and exhuberance can feel quite sincere, and the resulting freshness from a little musical and theatrical fluff can be delightful.
Provision Theater's production of Godspell was, in two words, very energetic. The joyfulness and exhuberance I mentioned above abounded from start to finish, and the actors' collective excitement infected the audience. They properly exaggerated their characterizations, their timing was sharp, the cabaret was amusing, and the flow of the show was kinetic. But there were two major weaknesses, the first being that of bad acoustics and the second, that of bad singing. Despite the presence of some impressive vocal talent in the cast, a few soloists were clearly unprepared, one of whom caused me to cringe from his off-pitch screeching. Director Gregory should be wondering how that happened. Syler Thomas, who played Jesus, spoke too softly and with too little resonance to be heard consistently from the stage, even with a microphone. Justin Berkobien was the only player whose voice carried at all times, whether speaking or singing, natural or amplified.
But let's set aside Godspell's entertainment value for a moment. Even though the expiation of sins was, and still is, the heart of Christianity for many believers, Godspell poses a theological challenge that is simple in its observation but upsetting in its consequences, or so it was in 1971: why is it that many professing Christians don't focus on the words of Jesus? As the music of Godspell (and of Jesus Christ Superstar, for that matter) was becoming popular in the 1970s, this very question vexed young people like myself who were growing up in a Christian culture that still had an infrastructure of orthodoxy that liberal theology was reconfiguring and that secular disbelief was threatening with extinction. Liberal theology -- not to be confused with liberation theology -- was less difficult than orthodoxy to reconcile with science and logic, because it rooted religion in reason rather than deferring to an externally imposed authority.
Therefore, Godspell represented an attitude that appealed to many young people, myself included, who rejected what they saw as the silliness of certain stories in the Bible, the irrationality of certain tenets of the Faith, and the perpetuation of hypocrisy, in particular, the profession of Christ's love and the stubborn insistence on holding old inexorable postures that should have disappeared right after Samuel Sewall's public apology in 1697 for his role as a judge in the Salem Witch Trials. For myself and many others, what started as a liberalization of Christian theology evolved over the years into outright disbelief. For us, Godspell retains its cultural and historical importance today, but without having to be interpreted or appreciated as a bolus of religious dogma. Instead, it can function as an abstraction of, or a metaphor for, truth, becoming the "poetic interpretation of experience" that philosopher George Santayana identified more than a hundred years ago as the function of religion. More than teaching about honesty, compassion, humility, nonviolence, and wisdom, Godspell symbolizes the importance of revisiting our assumptions.
Like the parables, the songs carry out this function with simple universal meaningfulness that transcends religion. They abstract truths and questions that stretch across eons, cultures, and belief systems, and that all people would do well to contemplate, especially at a time in history when nearly everyone believes himself or his own faith to be above criticism. I offer their titles here, in order, with each song's nonreligious intimations.
"Day By Day": I seek goodness, whatever it proves to be.
"Learn Your Lessons Well": If you don't learn to distinguish good from bad, right from wrong, and fact from fiction, you'll regret it in the end.
"God Save the People": Stop the suffering.
"Bless the Lord": Respect reality because it's the font of everything we regard as good.
"All For the Best": Keep your perspective.
"All Good Gifts": We depend on Nature. And we depend on the laws of physics, in the manifestations of which which we see beauty. This song takes its lyrics from the hymn "We plow the fields, and scatter". One line, which I had to look up to clarify, is "...no gifts have we to offer, for all thy love imparts, and, what thou most desirest, our humble thankful hearts." In other words, we should keep our sense of wonder about the universe, while always bearing in mind the tempering effect of humility and the blinding effect of arrogance.
"You Are the Light of the World": Set an example.
"Turn Back, O Man": Stop being twits and start repairing the world.
"Alas For You": Hypocrites and similar fools are doomed.
"By My Side": This is less a song about love than one about admiration.
"We Beseech Thee": We're recognizing the consequences of our froward ways. And those consequences are a bit alarming.
"On the Willows": This is an adaptation of the 137th Psalm, which is on the whole an imprecation against Babylon for enslaving the author and his fellow Israelites.
1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4 How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7 Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
The Psalmist calls for destruction and revenge, ending with the shocking brutality of verse 9 (some apologists try to argue this away with laughable contortions of reasoning). So, why is this song in a story that both explicitly and implicitly advocates nonviolence, even in the face of one's own enemies? The fact that our lyricist truncated the song with verse 4 offers an explanation. The reference to the river parallels our characters' weeping, as though their tears raise the water level and merge with the river into a mighty flood. This image is consistent with the first two words of this Psalm in the Vulgate, super flumina, which phrase is easy to see as a pun on both the English "super" and the Latin "flumina" (which means "rivers" or "flood"). But in the context of Godspell, at least to me, the first four verses of Psalm 137 dovetail smoothly into the theme of emboldening people to confront the world's ills. And the metaphor continues. Do our captors, the people who won't let us be who we are, want us to sing their songs or the songs that contain our messages? How do we sing our songs in an unfamiliar land -- a culture in which we feel alien, a culture that doesn't trust us? How do we warn stubborn people about their foolishness? Do we go so far as sacrificing ourselves to get their attention?
And so it goes. Godspell is an entertaining allegory that represents the soft but effective evangelism of rational, evidence-based, lifelong truth-seeking. God is reality itself, whether we conceive of Him metaphorically as a loving father with a long white beard, whose eyes are on the sparrow, or whether we just use the name "God" as a moniker for the laws of physics and all their manifestations. Reality includes truth, reason, and human emotion, along with the decency that I should hope inevitably follows from their confluence, and from what I believe to be their synergism. Trying to distort or fictionalize reality, as religion usually does, is foolish. How unnecessary it feels to propose that reality is something we should all be trying to understand.