Lyrics: Tim Rice
Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber
Director: Timothy Sheader
10 years after it first packed the pews at Regent’s Park – and by way of the Barbican in 2019 and a socially distanced resurrection in the summer of 2020 – Timothy Sheader’s Olivier-winning Jesus Christ Superstar arrives at the Palladium on something nearer its fourth coming than its second. Indoors, it has lost the sky but kept the sweat. Sheader sends his cast screaming past the stalls in the opening number, and the congregation is converted: disciples within minutes, Judases by the interval. The betrayal is made easier by an audience that knows every word of the score and exactly when to turn.
Sam Ryder, hitherto better acquainted with Eurovision crowds than Roman ones, turns out to be the revelation of the night as an actor; the voice was never in doubt. He spits and splutters through the crucifixion with an abandon nobody had priced in and holds notes at lengths that border on the indecent, drenched in blood and glitter. Yet the most affecting minute of the evening is the instrumental John Nineteen: Forty-One – the one stretch this production leaves unadorned by chorus and choir.
In 2020, Judas’s kiss was denoted by a daub of paint on Christ’s cheek. Here, Tyrone Huntley, reprising the Iscariot that earned him an Olivier nomination in the park, plunges both hands into liquid silver – an inculpatory stain that marks him for the rest of the night. Guilt as a costume that won’t come off, however much he regrets putting it on. By the time he returns for the title number, he has stopped trying: a vision of pure silver, betrayal worn head to toe. Desmonda Cathabel’s Mary Magdalene, dark-eyed and pleading, plays mother before she plays lover: Everything’s Alright is delivered as a lullaby rather than a declaration, and the better for it.
Herod has always been this production’s jester, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson keeps the flame of camp burning. Where Josh Mostel’s film Herod, in his pagan sloth and gluttony, taunted Jesus from a poolside raft, the Modern Family star is more pride and vanity: gold filigree and a haughty air, as if auditioning for his own beatification. Boy George, Richard Armitage and the rest of the incoming incumbents queuing to take communion will find his glittered boots hard to fill. Bob Harms, meanwhile, booms through Caiaphas with a bass menace that outweighs even Bob Bingham’s 1973 rendition.
The one performance that keeps faith with neither text nor tradition is David Thaxton’s Pilate: a magnificent voice deployed in a single register, hostility without hesitation. Pilate’s dramatic function is ambivalence – a man talking himself out of cruelty and failing – and Thaxton’s flattened aggression leaves the lyrics arguing with their delivery. Barry Dennen found the doubt in 1973; here it is simply absent.
Tom Scutt’s girders still stand for temple and building site alike; the tanks that crested the hill in the film have become masked Roman spearmen, and the giant cross doubles as the stage itself before rising in the final minutes – slow, vast, light flickering through its grey metal mesh, and never quite reaching the vertical: a show that has always stopped short of resurrection, stopping short once more.
The glitter is another matter. When Jesus takes his 39 lashes in a shower of gold rather than under a whip – blood as shimmering spectacle – the image ought to devastate. But the ensemble has spent two hours discharging the stuff on the slightest pretext, and by the time the flogging arrives, the currency is spent. A decade and three iterations on, the glitter cannon still sits on a hair trigger.
This staging has always modernised everything except the reverence in which it holds its own traditions. While the costumes are contemporary, the microphones are still cabled, mockery has never once been turned on the show itself. Nobody in this Superstar, not even Georgie Best, is wearing frilly knickers or even a padded bra.
Between Ryder’s stamina, Huntley’s silvered hands and Drew McOnie’s choreography – contemporary folded into something liturgical – this Superstar preaches convincingly to the converted and wins a few souls besides.
Runs until 5 September 2026, then the production transfers to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane from 16 October 2026 to 9 January 2027.
