Godspell

Published Wednesday 3 October 2007 at 11:10 by Mark Shenton

Nothing dates faster than the recent past.

No wonder that the musical Rent - set at the apex of the New York AIDS crisis of the 90s - has been re-labelled Rent Remixed and updated for its imminent West End reincarnation.

Godspell, a pop musical re-telling of the New Testament story that culminates in the crucifixion of Jesus, should be timeless, but its buoyant score and hippy-ish vibe is very much a product of the time of its original early seventies creation.

The new touring revival of Godspell may have given its famous logo image a psychedelic make-over and put its attractive young cast in hip new clothes, but in other crucial regards, it is showing its age.

“Could none of you stay awake for one hour?”, Jesus chastises his disciples towards the end, but he could have been speaking to members of the audience, including me.

Though Stephen Schwartz - currently represented in the West End by his score to Wicked - resuscitates the show regularly with welcome injections of his irresistible melodies, the glue that’s supposed to hold them together in John-Michael Tebelak’s improvisatory story-telling has long become unstuck.

Paul Kerryson’s production - unduly burdened by a set that is both an ugly and physically flimsy outline of a village - fails to bring the ragged result into a unified focus, and Stephen Gateley, the formerly slight pop poppet who is thickening around the middle now, flounders badly as Jesus as he tries to hold it together. Instead, it is Ryan Molloy as John the Baptist and Judas (who uncannily resembles Jeremy Irons, who originally played the parts in the first London production in 1971) - who projects more charisma, while Tiffany Graves, prowling over the front stalls for “Turn Back, O’Man”, is sexy but invisible to many as she does so.