Is the son of God – the Christian God – required to have testosterone?
While legends dubiously claim medieval theologians debated how many angels could dance on the tip of a needle, modern-day theologians and religion observers have jumped into the fray to debate the gender of God (again, the Christian God).
However one debates God’s anatomy, the case for Jesus as a male seems more clear-cut: There’s that passage from John in the King James version of the Bible, after all: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . the only begotten Son.”
But here comes City Repertory Theatre with its all-female version of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which opens the Palm Coast troupe’s 14th season with performances tonight and through Sept. 29 in its newly renovated black box theater at City Marketplace.
City Rep’s 2024-2025 season also includes Neil Simon’s “Jake’s Women,” Clifford Odets’s “The Country Girl,” Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-winning “Topdog/Underdog,” Eleanor Burgess’ “The Niceties,” the musical “Violet,” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in an adaptation by area theater director-actor Bethany Stillion. (See a full preview here.)
“Jesus Christ Superstar,” that superstar rock opera with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, debuted as a concept album in 1970 before the musical made its on-stage Broadway debut in 1971. By 1980, “Jesus” was the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of the musical theater world, grossing more than $237 million worldwide and setting the record for longest-running London West End musical – eight years – before Webber’s “Cats” eclipsed it in 1989.
The she-Jesus – at least the one based on Webber’s musical – first reared her head in the 20-teens when Juilliard grad and soul-jazz-musical theater singer Morgan James had a dream that she was singing the role. James set about making her dream a reality, and she spearheaded a one-night-only, all-female performance of the musical at New York City’s Highline Ballroom on the evening before the Women’s March in January 2017.
The ecstatic reaction to that performance led James to take she-Jesus further, and so she held recording sessions in 2018 that featured not only the female cast but also an all-female crew of orchestra, other musicians, a chorus and studio engineers. Truncated versions of those recordings were released over the years until a recording of virtually the full musical appeared in April 2022 under the title “Jesus Christ Superstar: Highlights From the All-Female Studio Cast Recording.”
Yes, the original production of JCS more than a half-century ago spurred controversy, as OG Jesus Ted Neeley recalled in a 2023 interview headlined “How Jesus Christ Superstar went from blasphemous to beloved.”
More recently, the Dionysian opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics spurred widespread whiplash as some conservative Christians claimed the pageantry mocked Jesus at the last Supper.
But a quick hopscotch through the internet reveals, apparently, that no such controversy was spawned by the Morgan James she-Jesus.
Even City Rep founding director John Sbordone, who saw the original “Superstar” production on Broadway in 1971, and who has cast a Black Jesus, a Pakistani Jesus and a female Judas twice in his three previous productions of the musical, admits that he didn’t know about the she-Jesus version until it came on CRT’s radar earlier this year.
Michele O’Neil, City Rep’s she-Jesus, confesses “I was raised Catholic, and certain visuals you know come to mind, and I kind of had to dismiss a lot of that because of my upbringing and my religious background.
“It’s a challenge,” she adds, noting this is her first time playing a male role in 40-odd years of doing theater.
Under the tutelage of Sbordone, O’Neil says, she was able “to dig deep and stop looking at how I look in the mirror. I have to look at how I feel spiritually and carry that through my character.”
O’Neil, whose credits include area productions of “Gypsy,” “Mamma Mia!,” “Evita” and CRT’s “Honky Tonk Angels,” says she has been able to approach her role as Jesus as “it’s everyman. I approach it as there’s no gender. We’re singing this beautiful, beautifully orchestrated music and telling the story, and hopefully if we tell it correctly all of this is going to be gone (motions to her body) and the audience is not going to look at me as whatever – they’re going to reflect on the story and maybe that will cause them to rethink how they view their religious beliefs.”
For theological backing (concerning perceptions of God if not Christ), O’Neil need look no further than Daniel Weiss, a professor of Divinity at Cambridge, who writes: “Right at the beginning of the Bible, in a passage shared by Judaism and Christianity, the book of Genesis, chapter 1 verse 27, describes all humanity as being created in the image of God.”
“I grew up Catholic as well,” Sbordone says. “I’ve always looked at the New Testament as a humanistic document – that Jesus is the final arbiter of humanism, of kindness and forgiveness, of community and those kinds of things.”
And besides, Sbordone adds, “Here at CRT, we’re blind racially and sometimes gender” – a reference to the many times City Rep has boldly, and blithely, gone avant-garde with its casting choices.
City Rep veteran Laniece Fagundes, who played Mary Magdalene in a 2010 Flagler Playhouse production directed by Sbordone, jumped at the chance to play Judas.
“Having also done the show as a (church) worship leader and being really, really, really completely devout in my faith and in my walk with my Christianity at the time, it’s very different doing it now being post a worship leader,” Fagundes says. “I still believe in God and Jesus, but I’m not as devout in practicing as I was, so it’s a very different mindset for me in approaching this. Also it just felt like it would be more to chew on as Judas than Jesus.
“It’s a little bit more of a rollercoaster of what Judas is going through – believing in Jesus as a leader, seeing him as somebody who has performed miracles, and you still have to come to a place where you ultimately say he is not who he is.”
Mention that JCS almost seems like Judas’s play, and O’Neil is quick to add: “Oh it is. I think it’s the story told through Judas’s eyes. It’s what he witnesses.”
“With an all-woman cast, we’ve worked very much on the interpersonal relationships between Mary and Jesus and Judas,” Sbordone says. “Judas’s dilemma is really a magnificent one – there’s the fate of what has to happen and the love that they share. The conflict between that simply tears Judas apart.”
Portraying that love in song led to a rare coup for the play. In 1971, JCS became one of the few Broadway musicals to place a song in the Top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart: the ballad “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” sung by the Mary Magdalene character. Even more remarkable, two recordings of the song became concurrent hits that year: one by Yvonne Elliman, who played the Mary Magalene role on Broadway, and one by Helen Reddy.
While “Jesus Christ Superstar” can’t claim to be the first rock opera – that accolade is variously bestowed upon “S.F. Sorrow” by the Pretty Things in 1968, or the Who’s “Tommy” in 1969 – the Webber-Rice musical is still a behemoth more than a half-century after its debut. That’s evidenced by all of the worldwide productions touted on its official website.
The musical’s appeal, evidently, reaches beyond Christendom.
“It’s so much more than the story of Jesus,” O’Neil says. “I don’t mean to defame that, but it’s about our journey as human beings, and it just happens to be the journey of that human being. At the end of the day, everybody has choices and makes choices, and whether the choice is right or wrong, I hope that the audience goes away thinking about their faith or lack thereof, or just thinking about how to be a good human being in the world, or reflecting on their life.
“If we can make people feel something when they walk out of here, we did our job.”
City Repertory Theatre will stage “Jesus Christ Superstar” at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays from Sept. 13-29. Performances will be in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets are $30 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time.
The cast:
Jesus – Michele O’Neil
Judas – Laniece Fagundes
Mary Magdalene – Phillipa Rose
Pilate – Mariah Snow
Herod – Monica McNulty Clark
Peter – Jen Chidekel
Annas – April Whaley
Simon – Raquel Schenone
Caiaphas – Sonia Pagan-Lopez
Diane Ellertsen is choreographer and Julia Hood is music director.
