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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and this is episode 35 of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud. On Easter Sunday, 2018, the US television network NBC presented a live concert version of Jesus Christ Superstar, which was staged in the Marcy Avenue Armory, a massive aircraft hangar-sized barn in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. The audience of around 1500 was live on camera, with several hundred lining two sides of the stage in a kind of streamlined, moderately respectable mosh pit. The leading performers were John Legend as Jesus, Sara Bareilles as Mary Magdalene, Brandon Victor Dixon as Judas, and as King Herod, Vincent Furnier, originally from Detroit, Michigan, who had a strong Christian upbringing before becoming better known as Alice Cooper.

[1:03] Tim Rice: Through my friendship with Robert Jess Roth, who directed the Broadway smash Beauty and the Beast, to which I contributed lyrics, I met Alice many years ago and have seen many of his concerts, which Rob staged over the past 25 years, both in the UK and in America. Incidentally, I'm speaking at the very start of 2021, Rob has been in the UK recently, mainly I suspect under COVID lock and key in his hotel room, attempting to put together the forthcoming new UK tour of Beauty and the Beast scheduled for May, which may be pushing it, but fingers crossed, it's a good show.

[1:41] Tim Rice: Back to JC Superstar and Alice. I was officially an executive producer for the NBC show, and while I dare say it would have gone on without me, I did feel my suggestion, indeed, near insistence that Alice Cooper play Herod entitled me to my producer's Emmy a few months later. The Emmys are TV's Oscars and are the big deal in the U.S. small screen world. Along with an army of our fellow EPs, exec prods, executive producers, Andrew Lloyd Webber and I attended the Emmy Show in LA in our evening wear one afternoon, and NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar picked up an Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special Brackets Live during the 2018 Creative Arts Emmy Awards. There were nine of us executive producers, but we all got an Emmy.

A lethally dangerous-looking statuette of a winged woman, apparently holding an atom about the size of a baseball. It's an extremely heavy object, and her wings are viciously pointed, capable of halting a stampeding buffalo in its tracks. However, as Superstar in America had been pretty much an award-free zone in the first 50 years of its existence, I was more than grateful for the Emmy nod, the work having been passed over for Grammys, Tonys, and Oscars. The Emmy was quite a hefty thing to cart around at the after-show dinner, and also therefore difficult to nick, but mercifully, the award organizers took it back after the first course and promised to post it to the UK, suitably engraved, which they did. So here is a result of my award-winning executive production work, Alice Cooper as King Herod.

[3:26] ♪ Musical number: "King Herod's Song" — performed by Alice Cooper ♪

[6:36] Tim Rice: Alice was perfect for the role because he was first and foremost believable. Too many Herods over the years have been too camp and over the top, so while often amusing, not at all sinister, lose that menacing, disturbing quality, and the point of the scene gets lost. Alice is a fine actor. The NBC Superstar featured a spectacular cast besides Alice. Not only did he play Jesus, John Legend was a fellow executive producer. I knew his recordings, but I'd never seen him live. Mary, Sara Bareilles, I had seen perform twice. In the excellent Broadway musical, she wrote both words and music for and starred in, Waitress. I'd seen Brandon Victor Dixon in Lin-Manuel Miranda's astounding success, Hamilton, in which he played Vice President Aaron Burr, who, spoiler alert, kills Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

So I knew we were in good hands. Then there were important supporting roles such as Ben Daniels as Pilate, Norm Lewis as Caiaphas, and Erik Grönwall as Simon Zealotes, and they were all on the button. Direction of the whole shooting match was in the hands of fellow Brit David Leveaux and Alex Rudzinski and their entire creative team delivered a show which worked all but perfectly visually and musically. It had to work, as there were only two performances, with the first being a dress rehearsal in front of an audience, and the second, the live broadcast. The dress rehearsal was also recorded, so in the event of any difficulties during the live broadcast, it was there as an emergency backup. But it wasn't needed.

It was a bit nerve-wracking sitting just behind the holy mosh pit, hoping that the huge resources put together for the concert would all gel, and that the audience, virtually on stage in some individual cases, and in full view of the cameras, would actually like what they were seeing and almost taking part in. So the reaction at the top of the show was important. Brandon rose to the occasion, and after the Nigel Wright Orchestra's magisterial and pulsating overture, gave his all to "Heaven on Their Minds." The crowd went wild, and as John and Sara joined the proceedings, Wilder, as you can hear here, as you can hear here, as the three leads with an insanely energetic chorus of singers and dancers get into full swing with "What's the Buzz?"

[9:08] ♪ Musical number ♪

[11:06] Tim Rice: She alone is trying to give me what I need right here now.

[11:46] ♪ Musical number ♪

[13:25] Tim Rice: I wish I could remember where I got the phrase, what's the buzz from? I'm sure I didn't invent it, but on the other hand, my occasional attempts at researching the source of the expression have not been very conclusive. It seems a bit dated to me now, but it proved a particularly memorable catchphrase in the early days of the work, and possibly half a century later could almost stagger back into fashion. If it ever was in fashion. But there again, there are plenty of words I wrote back at the start of my career, which I would not have chosen now. There again, again, my early efforts wouldn't have been quite as fresh or natural if I'd written them later. If you see what I mean. I'm not sure. I see what I mean.

Anyway, I've recently been attempting to sort out my collection of books, which has got out of control, as has my collection of records and CDs. There is currently a lot more literature and music on the floor than in the shelves, so a cull and trips to the charity shops are necessary. However, I have come across one or two gems which I never knew I had, often because they were in my late parents' collection. My parents were both serious bibliophiles. One fascinating book I've unearthed is The Man Born to Be King by Dorothy L. Sayers. I'd definitely heard of Dorothy L. Sayers as the creator of the Lord Peter Whimsey Mysteries, but I'm ashamed to say I only knew of her as a crime writer, and I'd never read any of her works, although I'd heard radio adaptations of her well-known tales of her aristocratic detective.

Like Alice Cooper, her father was a churchman in Huntingdonshire, as opposed to Detroit. Dorothy L. Sayers, born in 1893, was much more than a crime novelist. She was a teacher, poet, and advertising copywriter. In 1923, her first Peter Whimsey book was published, three years after Hercule Poirot's debut in Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Stiles. Ten further whimsy novels followed Sayers first. The Man Born to Be King is a play cycle on the life of Jesus, commissioned by the BBC and presented to the organization for broadcasting between December 1941 and October 1942. In other words, slap in the middle of the world war. There were no fewer than 12 plays in all, nine hours worth, a momentous achievement.

As far as I can tell, they were last broadcast in 2007. But I admit my research team, me, hasn't spent too much time checking this out. But I have so far read one or two of the plays in the cycle, and I'm astonished how similar Dorothy Sayre's approach seems to be to the one I had when writing Jesus Christ Superstar. The dialogue, notably in the trial before Pilate and in the scene where Jesus appears before Herod, while obviously prose rather than verse, is uncannily along the same lines as you will have heard a few minutes back from Alice. For example, here is Dorothy Sayers Herod talking to his servant about his meeting with Jesus. I have long been anxious to see him, having heard many sensational stories.

Alas, he was a disappointment. I asked him all the questions I could think of. My poor brain never functions very well before breakfast, but he was silent and refused to speak. Not nearly such good entertainment as his cousin John the Baptist, whom I regretfully beheaded last year, and who could always be relied on for a rousing hellfire sermon. I invited him to perform a few prodigies for our amusement, but no, he would only shake his head and stare at me with those large eyes of his, till I was quite out of countenance. As for the kingship of Israel. That was King Herod, according to Dorothy L. Sayers. And all the while during that speech, Herod was playing with a pet monkey, a prop that no director of Superstar has, as far as I know, yet introduced into a production.

And then Judas, who, to put it mildly, has quite an important role in the Jesus story, has a great deal to say in The Man Born to Be King, as he does in Jesus Christ Superstar, whereas in the four Gospels, he barely utters a word. What I found even more interesting was the fact that Sayers's play cycle ran into criticism before it was even produced, and was attacked at her press conference to launch the plays by many who hadn't even heard more than a line or two, if that. It was called blasphemous, irreverent, vulgar. Now, where had I heard that before? Of course, the attacks helped promote the work, and Sayers herself wrote in an introduction to her plays that she would like to, quote, thank the Lord's Day Observance Society and the Protestant Truth Society, who so obligingly did all our publicity for us at, I fear, considerable expense to themselves.

Without their efforts, the plays might have slipped by with comparatively little notice. When Superstar in 1970, and indeed Monty Python's Life of Brian ten years later, faced exactly the same kind of attacks. It only helped the respective pieces succeed. Naturally, I like to think that they also succeeded because they struck a genuine chord with their audiences and had some merit. I can certainly vouch for Life of Brown in that respect. Incidentally, by chance I happened to be the host of a late-night chat show, Friday night and Saturday morning, when John Cleese and Michael Palin defended the life of Brown against the outrage of Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood.

I was looking forward to chipping in intelligently by reminiscing about the JC Superstar controversy ten years earlier, but could barely get a word in Edgeways, which probably meant the program was going well. I sometimes think more people have seen that television programme over the years than have seen Superstar. I'm glad I didn't know about the man born to be king when I was writing the words for Jesus Christ Superstar. I'm sure it would have influenced me one way or the other. Either I would have been tempted to lift some of Dorothy L. Sayers' thoughts and expressions, or gone out of my way to avoid going down the same path as she did. In either case, I wouldn't have been writing exactly what I wanted.

I did very little research when working on Superstar, beyond reading parts of the four gospels and a fairly conventional Life of Christ, written by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. So whether people liked it, loathed it, or were indifferent to it, at least the thoughts, words, and messages, if any, were, for better or worse, primarily mine. I never claimed they were wildly original. I didn't know if they were, but in their presentation, they certainly were, thanks to Andrew's great musical score. I could bang on a lot more about the creation of the work that set Andrew and me on the path that eventually led us to winning Emmys for executive production half a century later, but better to finish with something from the NBC concert. So here is Ben Daniels as pilot, interrogating John Legends Jesus. I think Dorothy would have approved.

[21:09] ♪ Musical number ♪

[21:19] Tim Rice: That was Get On to My Cloud, podcast number thirty-five in the series. Written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced by Peter Hobbs.