Welcome to the Church of ‘Godspell’

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

... “Godspell,” which opens Monday in its first Broadway revival, was serious business in 1971. At the time American religion was in a profound state of flux. The pews were emptying out, and children especially were disappearing from mainline Christianity. Vocations to the Catholic priesthood were cratering, and from 1963 to 1972 the number of American Catholics going to Mass declined from about three quarters to half (and kept falling). To take one startling statistic, Episcopal church school enrollment fell by a quarter from 1965 to 1971, the year “Godspell” made its debut Off Broadway. John-Michael Tebelak, who conceived and first directed the show, was himself an Episcopalian who later flirted with the priesthood before dying, at 36, in 1985. His church’s pews, even more than most, were vacant.

Young people wanted to leave the church, but not all of them wanted to abandon Christianity. Many wanted to return to a more primitive expression of their faith, and they reimagined Jesus as an accessible hippie, a cool friend rather than an object of veneration. In 1970, when Carnegie-Mellon theater majors threw together “Godspell” — which dervish-danced from La MaMa to the Cherry Lane Theater to the movie screen and finally, in 1976, to Broadway — it was quite subversive, or so they hoped, to make up Jesus like a clown. They dressed him in a Superman costume, and he danced joyously with a multiracial cast, quite obviously having fun (and, easy to imagine, having sex).

The musical’s challenge to polite Christian society was not lost on the establishment....

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