Theatre in Review: Godspell (Circle in the Square Theatre) If the current Broadway revival of Godspell proves anything, it's that not every hit show of the past must be seen again. In this revival-happy era, Godspell must have seemed especially tempting. A blockbuster in its heyday, it was subsequently staged by thousands of school and community theatres. (Catholics of my age will recall the many Masses we attended featuring Stephen Schwartz's songs in the lineup of hymns.) Moreover, the show's youthful stance would seem to be a major plus factor, given the many Broadway shows now aimed at adolescent audiences. Despite the current production's long road to Broadway -- it was announced, then scrapped, a couple of years ago, thanks to lack of funding -- it must have seemed the surest of things. Time will tell if the producers' commercial calculations were correct, but, to my mind, Daniel Goldstein's production offers a powerful illustration of the age-old maxim: You can't go home again. Certain plays can speak authentically to their times -- and fade away, honorably. (A good play isn't necessarily a classic, ipso facto, no matter how many press agents claim otherwise.) Godspell is a perfect example --a show created in reaction to an America both inspired and confounded by the rise of the counterculture, an overturning of conventional middle-class values leading to, depending on your point of view, either a new utopia or moral chaos. This was also the era in which the Catholic Church underwent a series of modernist reforms, opening itself to the world in an entirely new way. In the middle of this turmoil, John-Michael Tebelak, who conceived and directed the original, and his collaborators had the inspired idea of presenting the Book of Matthew as a kind of clown show performed by a ragtag troupe of hippies. The original staging was fast, funny, and seemingly freeform in the way it presented Christ's parables as a series of put-ons and comic sketches. Add in Schwartz's score, with its unbeatable collection of pop hooks, and you can see why Godspell seemed indestructible for a decade or so. I first saw Godspell in 1972 -- I was a teenager -- and was enchanted by it. I saw it again, in various stagings, in 1977, 1980, and 1988. Each time, a bit more of its charm was rubbed away. Certainly, I changed with time, but so did the world -- and each passing year made Godspell's style seem increasingly irrelevant. In this year of our Lord 2011, it has profoundly lost contact with the world as we know it. The counterculture has been co-opted by the Gap and MTV, reduced to a marketing concept. (There's Occupy Wall Street, but those justly angry, if rather confused, mobs have little to do with the show's joyful street people.) Christianity is now represented by a cadre of power-grabbing politicians seeking to dominate American life. The Catholic Church has become a sclerotic and scandal-ridden bureaucracy. This is rather hard ground on which to plant the seed of Godspell's good news. Goldstein's production tries, in a thousand different ways, to update Godspell for modern audiences, but to little avail. Given its cultural disconnect, what once seemed like an outburst of innocent fun has hardened into showbiz shtick -- a farrago of glitter cannons, pools, trampolines, dry ice effects, and moving-light cues. (I guess we should be grateful there's no LED wall.) Compared to the original, it is the mega-church version, its simple message drowned out by technology and slick staging ideas. This is obvious from the "Tower of Babel" prologue, in which various star philosophers pontificate on top of each other; Goldstein, ever alert to modern trends, has given them all smartphones, and, for currency's sake, he has added L. Ron Hubbard and Marianne Williamson to the mix of Socrates, Galileo, and Thomas Aquinas. The sequence fails on two counts - for one thing, the point is that Christ's message was more profound and moving than anything created by the great minds of Western Civilization; adding in pinheads like Hubbard and Williamson trivializes this. In addition, the actors spend most of the sequence relating to their phones, and not the audience. The script was always a loose affair, with plenty of room for topical or local references. Here, we get by a truckload of stale jokes about Lindsay Lohan, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump, and stimulus packages, leaving one to wonder if Godspell was derived not from the New Testament but Joan Rivers' gag files. There's some lame audience participation, for sessions of Pictionary and charades. Certain sections are given a hip-hop twist. The entire enterprise is marked by a constant sense of straining after invention, and settling for easy punch lines. The production's jaded, anything-for-a-laugh nature is signaled by a moment in which Jesus strikes a comic crucifixion pose -- a completely tone-deaf moment in a show that climaxes in the calamity of his cruel execution. The cast members are thoroughly conscientious, busily going about their well-drilled routines, but an air of spontaneity is missing and few of them make much of an impression. Hunter Parrish's Jesus is attractive and blessed with a charming smile, but he doesn't dominate the proceedings, and he is, all too often, vocally challenged. Even with the aid of a handheld mic you can barely hear him in his big number, "Alas for You." Telly Leung pulls of a series of rapid-fire old-movie parodies at one point, and his powerful voice is shown off to good advantage in "All Good Gifts." Uzo Aduba brings a welcome touch of gravity to the ballad "By My Side," which signals the tragedy to come. If most of the other numbers fail to land, it's largely because Michael Holland's new orchestrations have juiced them up beyond recognition. "Turn Back, O Man" has been transformed from a Mae West-inspired piece of barrelhouse blues into a piece of Atomic lounge special material. It's not a fair trade. David Korins transforms the difficult Circle in the Square space into an abandoned theatre, with a well-worn stage deck, dilapidated chandeliers, and broken ceiling pediments. It's a reasonably effective idea. David Weiner's lighting is a smoothly professional job, as is always the case with him; the problem is, this is a situation where less would definitely be more. Miranda Hoffman's costumes are pretty much what you would expect, seemingly drawn from the thrift shops of New York. Andrew Keister, the sound designer, must have had a tall order. The Circle in the Square isn't designed for amplified sound and the musicians are spread over all four quadrants of the theatre. This probably explains the show's heavily miked quality -- the voices sound as if they are coming from the speakers above the stage and not the performers -- as well as the liberal amounts of reverb used in each number. There's every indication that everyone involved with this production entered into it sincerely hoping to update Godspell for the 21st century. All the conventional skills of our day have been applied to the task, but, unfortunately, the material won't budge. The result is a noisy, charmless entertainment that remains firmly stuck between two worlds. In its day, Godspell was a lovely show, it's time to give it a nice, long rest.--David Barbour 
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